Exo

by Fonda Lee

  There must be something else he could say, some way he could get what he wanted without resorting to desperate actions. His father was, above all, a pragmatic man. “Father … have you considered that if we spared Mom, Sapience might be willing to offer something in return? She was … really close to the cell leader. In a, um, romantic way. Maybe—”

  “No, Donovan.” The openness, the shade of emotional vulnerability that had been there a moment before, vanished at once. “You’ve already been dragged far too deeply into this deplorable drama. Despite all my efforts, it’s disrupted your life, your career. We’ve already discussed this. Whatever happens to that woman now, you’re not to get involved any further. Do you understand?”

  Donovan opened his mouth, then closed it again, his face hot. There was no point in arguing. Be a good soldier. Pretend everything’s fine. Do what you’re told.

  “Yes, sir.” Donovan’s voice came out flat as paper.

  His father’s voice lost some of its steel. “After the High Speaker’s visit, after Peace Day, when things have settled down, we’ll talk more. I’ll explain more to you than I can now. You must trust me for the time being.”

  Donovan watched his father’s back disappear up the stairs.

  It turned out to be easier to commit treason than Donovan expected. The opportunity came four days later, near the end of an afternoon patrol shift. He and Jet were parked outside a dilapidated single-story home belonging to the Hatler brothers, whom they’d arrested earlier in the day for spray-painting SHROOM LOVERS and MARKED FOR DEATH on the windows of an elementary school in a predominantly erze-marked neighborhood.

  “It’s not safe here anymore,” one of the neighborhood moms had said, rubbing her line-and-dot Engineer’s markings nervously as they took her statement. “We don’t want the kids to grow up sheltered, but as soon as I’m promoted, we’re going to apply for residency in the Round. With both boys Hardened, we have a good chance.” Her two sons chased each other in circles, thrilled that school was canceled. The younger one was only five or so, a newborn exo, bald as an egg, nodes curved up the back of his skull like a question mark.

  The Hatler brothers were punks. All Donovan and Jet had found in the house were crowbars, two shotguns, empty six-packs of beer, and a bucket of paint in the back of a pickup truck. Nothing SecPac worthy. They’d driven the zip-tied, cursing culprits to the civilian police station and handed them over. Just to be sure they hadn’t missed anything, they’d come back to search more thoroughly and interview the neighbors. Jet called their unremarkable report into Command, then punched the line closed. “What a pair of bozos,” he said, stretching his arms up to the ceiling of the skimmercar.

  “Sape rejects,” Donovan agreed. Guys full of hate but too dumb to be real sapes.

  Jet pointed to a house down the street they’d visited a few months prior. It felt like years ago. “Hey, isn’t that where Ms. What’s-Her-Face lives? The lady with the banana bread?”

  “Ms. Bissell?”

  “Yeah, Ms. Bissell. We should go back for more of her banana bread. Anything we need to question her about?” Following leads, knocking on doors and talking to people in unmarked neighborhoods like this one, they never knew what kind of reception they’d get. Sometimes people wanted to kill them. Sometimes they got invited in and served coffee and banana bread.

  Donovan slid his partner an incredulous look. “I still can’t believe you ate her bread.”

  “You missed out; it was such good bread.”

  “She might’ve been a Sapience sympathizer. She could’ve laced that bread with rat poison.”

  “I think I would’ve been able to tell if it was poisoned.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “You were there, so you would’ve known who’d poisoned me.”

  “What if I’d eaten the bread?”

  “But you didn’t. I knew you had my six. That’s why I ate two pieces.” Jet grinned, and although Donovan feigned exasperation, as was their way, a swift, deep guilt stabbed into him.

  It was as if everything were back to normal. Jet was in such a good mood, visibly relieved to have his erze mate back on the job and acting like himself. In truth, Donovan hardly felt like himself. He slept badly at night. He worried about Anya, he thought about his mother’s upcoming execution, he replayed awful moments in his mind, he was troubled by the things his father had said about what might happen if the zhree abandoned Earth. It took all his energy just to hide his anxieties from Jet; he felt as if he was lying with his whole being.

  Jet checked the dashboard clock; he was taking Vic to a fondue place in one of the upscale parts of the Ring Belt that evening and had been counting down the time all day.

  “Why don’t you take off early?” Donovan suggested. “We’re done here.”

  His partner shrugged. Jet never cut out early, but today he was clearly tempted.

  “I’m serious. Go change into something nice, pick up some flowers.”

  Jet hesitated. “What about you?”

  “I don’t mind; you covered for me when I went to therapy tank the other day. Gate 3 is like five minutes from here; I’ll drop you off, then go calm down the principal at that school and loop back up to Command the long way.” When his erze mate still didn’t answer, Donovan added, with a calculated combination of jesting and hurt annoyance, “What’s wrong? You don’t trust me to look after myself anymore?”

  Jet had indeed been subtly reluctant to let Donovan out of his sight since they’d been back on duty. Being called out for it now, though, he forced a smile. “I know for sure you’re not going to eat any suspicious baked goods.” He started the skimmercar and set it into motion. “Well, all right. Thanks for the cover. If you’re sure you’re okay with it …”

  After Jet was out of the car and through the gates of the Round, Donovan drove to an address the two of them had searched a month ago: the home of Jim and Mila Guerra, the taciturn couple who were definitely Sapience members but very good at hiding any hard evidence of it. The Guerras lived in a wood-sided duplex in a neighborhood known for being sympathizer-heavy. Donovan parked on the street and sat in the car for a minute, scared stiff by what he was about to do.

  Forty-eight hours earlier, Hannah Maxine Russell had been convicted on multiple charges of terrorism, conspiracy, and involvement in an illegal organization. Donovan had watched the proceedings on the evening news. His mother had stood with her manacled hands clasped calmly in front of her as the judge read out the long list of accusations. Her gaze was distant, as if she was only half paying attention. On-screen, she appeared younger and more poised than in person; Donovan wondered if she was consciously playing a part for the cameras.

  Only when the judge asked her if she had anything to say for her crimes did she seem to rouse her attention to the bench. “I mourn the lives that have been lost in the fight for freedom. However, in the crusade for the preservation of our species, there are no true innocents. If you are not fighting against the alien, then you are serving it with your apathy. The blood I give is only a small drop in the ocean that must wash our planet clean of its invaders.”

  She sounded both chillingly sane and perfectly insane. An ordinary-looking middle-aged woman with the conviction of a zealot and a flair for the hyperbolically dramatic. The judge sentenced her to public execution by atomization. Perhaps he too had a sense for the dramatic, because he set the date for October 10—Peace Day itself.

  Donovan pulled the slightly crumpled envelope from the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. All day it had been sitting nestled against his chest, feeling as dangerous as a small nuclear device. Inside were three folded pages; they had taken hours of work while his father was out of the house. The first page stated the date, time, and place of Max’s scheduled execution thirteen days from today, along with detailed instructions on how to mount a rescue.

  It would be near impossible to break her out of Central Command and escape from the Round, so that left the short time during her t
ransport to the execution site as the best window of opportunity. The second page in the envelope was a map on which Donovan had outlined the possible routes to the Steps. The Steps was the largest public square in the Ring Belt. The center of it was arranged like an amphitheater and in the summer it was used for local concerts and festivals. Children gamboled up and down the tiers of brick seating, and planters spilled over with bougainvillea. It was also where most public executions for capital offenses took place. On Peace Day, Donovan guessed the prison truck would take the longer route; the other two would be far more crowded. He’d patrolled those streets enough to be able to mark out the best place to block the road and attempt a rescue.

  The final page was a SecPac transport truck blueprint. Every SecPac vehicle went into engine lockdown if the driver activated a remote alarm, but Donovan had marked the hidden reset switch as well as the tracking system the rescuers would have to disable in order to hijack the truck and make an escape. All this and more he’d explained as best he could in the instructions before sealing the envelope and writing Saul Strong Winter across the front.

  It was the eagle that had clued Donovan in; he remembered that Guerra had an eagle tattoo on his arm—a small but exact copy of the eagle design Donovan had seen in Saul’s room in the Warren, that he’d also glimpsed on the back of Reed and Dixon’s truck. The eagle was a symbol of freedom, Tate had said. A symbol among Sapience’s inner circle, Donovan was sure of it. If Saul was alive and out there, odds were that the Guerras would know how to pass a message on to him through the terrorist network. If it could be done, if Sapience had the information they needed to pull it off, Saul would try to rescue Max from the atomizer.

  Donovan had no idea if the message would reach the Sapience commander in time, or at all. He didn’t even know if Saul was alive, much less where he was, or if he’d be able to put together a rescue crew so quickly. Even if the letter did find its way into the intended hands, the sapes might decide it was too risky, or conclude that it must be a SecPac trap and decide not to act. Donovan could only hope that Saul would realize it had come from him; no real SecPac ruse would be so obvious and detailed, and hand delivered by an officer in a patrol skimmercar.

  All in all, it was an awfully thin thread on which to hang even slim odds of success. Donovan stared at the envelope in his hands; before he could second-guess himself, he got out of the car and strode up the short walk to the front of the house. He felt as if he were watching himself and not really in control of what he was doing. It took only a second to bend down and slide the envelope under the door. He tapped the corner with his finger and the envelope disappeared. Just like that. So easily was treachery committed. Had it been this easy for his mother when she’d first started down the path to being an enemy of the state?

  Donovan went back to the skimmercar, wondering who was watching him from the neighboring windows. He drove several blocks before parking beside an empty playground because he felt like throwing up. He didn’t, but his hands shook so uncontrollably he squeezed them between his knees to try to stop it. Already, he was overwhelmed with regret; he wondered if he could fish the envelope back out from under the door and destroy it before it was found.

  “What have I done?” he asked himself out loud. The refrain tumbled around in his skull. What have I done? He’d plotted the escape of a dangerous criminal. He’d divulged SecPac information to terrorists. He’d lied to his best friend. He’d betrayed his father’s trust. If a high-profile terrorist escaped government custody en route to execution, the Prime Liaison’s political standing would be dealt a terrible blow and Sapience would claim a huge victory. It would be immeasurably more awful if anyone discovered that the traitor was Reyes’s own son, one of SecPac’s supposedly incorruptible soldiers-in-erze.

  The ramifications were suddenly monstrously huge; far bigger than Donovan had considered at first, far bigger than the risk of merely ruining his own life. The rescue attempt itself might go horribly wrong. What if his fellow officers were injured or even killed in the ambush? What if innocent people were caught in the cross fire? And if his mother did go free, he would have to live with the knowledge that she might go on to commit further crimes.

  Guilt flooded in. Donovan bent forward in his seat, queasy. He ought to be disgraced: stripped of his marks, expelled by his erze, renounced by his father. His certainty of this made him cringe in a kind of satisfyingly cathartic agony. Why had he done it? Why?

  Because he couldn’t shake the image of his mother’s tearful face as he’d walked away from her in the Pen. He was the reason she’d been captured. He’d been lost to her, then found, then lost again. They’d only had a few days together, he hadn’t even been very nice to her, but she’d been willing to stand up to her own people, to leave Saul and the Warren behind, to risk everything she cared about—everything except the cause itself—for the chance to get him back. It wasn’t the same as being there when he was growing up, but it still meant something—it meant a lot. If he couldn’t do the same for her, maybe he really was less human after all.

  If she went to the atomizer, she would be gone for good. Even when she’d been gone from Donovan’s life, the idea of her, the possibility of her, had always been there. It had been more real than she was. In a way, it still was. If he watched her blink out of existence, it would be like seeing a part of himself erased. Negated. If he stood by and let that happen, if he did nothing, nothing at all to even try to defy the tragedy of it, he would be only what his father and his erze had made him—an obedient, dutiful soldier. Another powerless human.

  Donovan sat with his forehead against the dash until his stomach felt calm enough for him to set the skimmercar into motion. His comm unit flashed; Jet checking up on him from the florist’s shop, like a paranoid mother hen. Donovan sent a quick reply, suggesting anything but roses (too cliché) and giving his partner grief for not being able to stay off his comm before a date.

  His heart felt heavy; what was done was done, what happened next was out of his hands and lodged firmly in the sphere of fate. He steered the skimmercar toward the Round.

  Two hours before dawn on the first of October, Donovan was roused from an uneasy sleep by the sound of sirens. Not the pulsing wail of human emergency vehicles but the deafening, vibratory booming of the Towers alarms—a sound he only heard during large-scale zhree military drills. He clambered out of bed, confused. “Father?”

  The Prime Liaison was not in his bedroom nor anywhere in the house. Donovan suspected his father had not come home at all last night. He threw on his uniform, checked and holstered his sidearm, and grabbed his comm unit. Outside, the flags over the house whipped violently in the sharp autumn wind. The alarm continued to bellow; it sounded as if a bullfrog the size of a mountain were squatting over the entire Round. Donovan jammed in his earbud, clapped a hand over his other ear, and toggled his transmitter. “Command, what’s going on?” The question was barely out of his mouth when a squad of eight Soldiers ran down the street toward the Towers. Donovan jumped back at their passing; running flat-out on all six limbs, Soldiers moved frighteningly fast, their battle armor and hard yellow eyes momentarily catching the light coming from the windows of the human residences along the street.

  His comm unit flashed an area-wide SecPac alert: ALL COMBAT-RATED OFFICERS EXCEPTING THOSE ON ACTIVE ASSIGNMENTS REPORT TO CENTRAL. Donovan ran for the garage and took the electricycle. He got onto the nearest concentric boulevard and laid on the acceleration. To his left, bright bursts of light flashed in the dark sky above the Towers. After a second, Donovan realized they were the thruster blasts of zhree fighter craft, rocketing up into orbit from the Towers’ launching pads.

  What in all erze is going on? Donovan opened his direct line to Jet. “Hey, where are you? Are you seeing this?” No answer. “Jet?”

  The alarms suddenly stopped. There were two follow-up blares—one short, one long, signaling the end of the emergency alert—and then the sirens fell silent. What had happened?

/>   Donovan turned into the grounds of SecPac Central Command and slowed; there were vehicles and stripes everywhere, crowding up near the front of the Comm Hub building. He found a spot to park the electricycle and joined the other soldiers-in-erze pushing through the double doors and filling the briefing hall. Donovan looked for Jet; he didn’t see him, but he spotted a bleary Leonidas Hsu by the back wall. He started shuffling through the crowd toward Leon, but at that moment, Commander Tate stormed in and demanded their attention.

  “Listen up. At approximately zero four hundred hours, orbital defense platforms detected the appearance of three Rii scouting vessels that transferred into our solar system between Mars and Jupiter. The vessels proceeded to slingshot around Mars while gathering information about Earth and its defenses.” A murmur swept through the room. Tate adjusted her wire-rim glasses and plowed on, referring to the notes on her screen. “At zero four forty-five, Mur Commonwealth warships fired upon the intruders, destroying one of them. At the same time, the Rounds were alerted to the threat of possible attack, as you all know from the god-awful racket this morning. Additional fighters were launched to support the warships and Soldiers mobilized to defend the Towers and zhree installations in case of surface invasion.”

  The tension swelled; muttered profanities broke out. “Going to be another War Era,” someone near Donovan mumbled grimly. Tate looked up and yanked the glasses off her nose. “Did I say I was done?” she bellowed. The briefing room quieted and the commander continued, “The remaining Rii scouts transferred out of the system shortly after the first one was destroyed. Although all orbital assets remain on high alert, the Rounds are standing down. From what Soldier Werth communicated to me just a few minutes ago, it appears that the Rii were solely on an intelligence-gathering mission and there’s no sign of an imminent attack. So don’t go bursting your nodes already. That said, Soldier Werth has asked me to make a few things clear.