by Nick Webb
That was something to think over later. Pike looked to where Charlie was picking his way down the mountain. The tension in his shoulders hadn’t eased, and his face was tight with anger. When he caught Pike looking, the man’s face twisted.
“Just ask. I know you want to.”
He hadn’t asked, because it didn’t matter—and because he didn’t want to know. Pike looked down at the ground passing under his feet. “Who? Who’s up there that’s yours?” he asked quietly.
“My wife. Our daughter.” Charlie looked north, and his eyes were distant. “Three years ago.”
Pike let his breath out slowly. He didn’t want to offer false promises, but he knew that was what he was supposed to do. “We’ll avenge them,” he promised.
Charlie flinched. Then, defiantly: “I’m going to find them.”
“You’re—” Pike broke off. They’re dead, he wanted to say. Even if they weren’t killed when they were taken, they’re dead now. No one lasts three years in a Telestine lab.
From the bitter smile on his lips, Charlie knew just what Pike was thinking. He didn’t bother to argue. He just gave a shrug, artfully careless. Who cares what you think? his eyes asked.
They walked on in silence.
Chapter Nine
Earth
Mountains Near Denver, North American Continent
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll want to see this.” Eva, a blonde woman who looked altogether too small for the impressive array of weaponry she was carrying, led the way up the path as Pike struggled to keep up.
Behind him, the other leaders of the Rebellion cell talked amongst themselves in low voices. Their camp was only Rebellion members, no children. Some of the members appeared to be spouses, but there were few of those. At some point during the past twenty-four years, the Rebellion had learned the awful cost of its operations.
Pike tried not to feel bitter about that.
“Here we are.” Eva held out a hand to pull him up onto an outcropping. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”
“No.” But the dizzying view was more seductive than he remembered. Sunlight dappled on the rough forest at the base of the foothill below, and he could just see himself spreading his arms and leaping....
He swallowed.
Eva wasn’t paying attention, though. Her arms were crossed and she was staring out at the Telestine city, far in the distance, that hovered over Old Denver. Her blue eyes looked furious.
Pike remembered that look too well from his father. He had always dreaded coming up into the mountains due to the inevitable angry lectures about the Telestines taking the planet. Then, Pike hadn’t cared much. The occupation was all he’d ever known, and as a child, it had been hard to mourn a city he’d never seen. He looked at their rough camp of forty and wondered how millions of people had ever lived all together, jumbled up in tall buildings.
Now Pike, a product of humanity’s exodus despite his Native origins, forced himself to look at the ruins of the city and the Telestine station that hovered above it.
It was sleek with shining metal curved all along the bottom. Sunlight gleamed and the metal gracefully arced up into spikes. Along the top were their buildings. Skyscrapers, he recalled wryly. The Telestine buildings fit the description better than human buildings ever had.
“Look.” Eva handed him a pair of binoculars. “Under the ... under their city.”
He set the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the view cautiously. It had been a long time since he’d been somewhere he could use binoculars—nothing on a ship was far away enough, and nothing in space was close enough.
For a while, he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He scanned past ruined structures, struts of metal and shattered glass that he could still only partially pick out. There was a tangle of green in the middle of the city, something that reminded him of the hydroponic air refreshers on the stations, but massive.
And then he saw it: movement. He squinted. It looked like one of the long repair bots, stretching up to the tops of one of the buildings.
“What is that?” He tried to dial in, but could not sharpen the view. He looked over at Eva. “Are they trying to repair the city?”
She laughed at that, actually laughed. The sound was harsh. “No. They’re tearing it down.”
“If we could just set that bot on their cities, we’d be good to go.” He couldn’t keep from smiling.
“It’s not a bot.” She didn’t smile back. “It’s a chain gang.”
He frowned, shook his head. The term made no sense to him.
“Humans. Well, Drones. Chained together.” She jerked her head at the city. “There are platforms all the way up that building, and every day, the humans walk up and demolish a little bit more of it.”
Drones. Human, but not quite, it seemed. He’d only ever met one, and he was strangely passive. His personality a void. Rumor had it that the Telestines bred them. Docile, meek, unquestioning. Intelligent, but empty. The perfect slave.
Pike held the binoculars back up to his face. He scanned across the city. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he caught the flickers of movement on a few of the structures. There would be more of them than he could see.
“Why not just blow it up? They have nukes, don’t they?” He knew that all too well.
“They’re sensitive to radiation, too. Or so we think. Plus, they’re taking the materials, melting them down. We think they’re salvaging the city. Probably to build more of their own. Easier than mining and smelting the raw ore.”
“That can’t be worth it.” They had the technology to extract minerals more efficiently than humans ever had, surely.
“Of course it can—when you don’t have to care about the labor.” Her eyes were fixed on the city, and though she could see nothing from this distance, he knew she was seeing the gangs in her mind’s eye. “And they wouldn’t want to ruin the view by tearing the ground open, now would they?”
He had no answer for that. There was no answer for that. Could a Telestine appreciate a view? For a free human, it was unknowable. “What are they building?”
“Their own city—we think.” For the first time, she sounded doubtful. “To be honest ... we aren’t sure. Sometimes it almost seems like we see military activity, but they don’t have anyone to fight that we know of.” She shrugged. “Serve them right if someone else came to take Earth from them, I guess, but then we’d be even worse off, wouldn’t we? Better the enemy you know? I never know what to hope for.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, that’s ... what’s happening here. Just so you know.”
“Where are they getting the people?”
She just shook her head.
“Seriously. Are they getting pulled off stations?”
She gave a bark of laughter. “No. Don’t—just don’t.” She swallowed, and pointed north. “It’s clear enough today, you might be able to see the lab.”
He hesitated, but it was clear she wasn’t going to explain any more. He raised the binoculars and adjusted them. The mountain peaks swung by in dizzying clarity, and then: the tiny shape of an airship.
They would be on foot going up into the mountains, he realized. They would watch the airship grow in their view until they were dwarfed beneath it. It would hang heavy over the mountains, the way the military ship had hung over the camp so long ago. He swallowed hard. “How are we getting in there? Are we going in some of their ships?”
“We can’t work their ships.” Her regret told him that they had tried it. “Best we can tell, they interface telepathically or something. Maybe it’s a security system that only recognizes Telestine physiology. You get into the cockpit and it’s all smooth. There’s something that looks like a control panel, but nothing on it. And we’ve never seen them use one. We studied their bodies, but we can’t tell much from that, either.”
“So how’re we getting up there?”
“We have some hovercraft. The Rebellion sent us two. Your drop ship was supposed to be a third, b
ut after it got blown up….” She shrugged.
“What?”
“The ship carrying your capsule. They designed it for impact, it was going to free fall after you. But Charlie told us how it got blown up.”
He remembered the jagged strut protruding from one of the sides of the capsule and felt a chill. He’d thought the holds just came off when the capsule released. Now the sideways jolt made more sense.
He couldn’t think about it, or he’d be sick. “So what’s the plan?”
“We stashed the ship north a ways. We’ll go on foot, rendezvous there, and take the ships up. You look for the Dawning chip thingie and we’ll run rescue missions back to the ground with one of the two ships—that way, you can still get off the lab as soon as you find the Dawning.”
“You say chip ... you don’t have any idea what I’m looking for, do you?”
She gave a helpless shrug. “I mean, I know it’s a computer of some sort, but all of their computers we’ve seen are white cubes or smaller chips, and there’s gotta be more than one in the lab, right? The information came from the Rebellion. We figured you’d know. We don’t even know how you found out about it. The labs don’t emit any signals that we can tell. Someone would have to be in their communications systems.”
He sighed and rubbed at his eyes, handed the binoculars back to her. “Well, we’ll have a couple of weeks to think about it.” He gave one look back at the city, then turned and pushed his way past the other members to start back down the path.
A losing, suicidal plan. Why the hell had he agreed to come back?
That’s right. Mountains. Air. Sun. Walker. Dawning.
It had sure as hell better be worth it.
Chapter Ten
Jupiter, Ganymede’s L4 Lagrange point
Fighter crew locker room, EFS Intrepid
“A whole squadron.” Dave Hernandez, or Fisheye to his fellow pilots, snapped his fingers and leaned forward to whisper meaningfully. “Just gone. Toast. Jodido!”
“Dammit, Fish.” Theo McAllister gave the pilot an exasperated look, and could only guess the vulgar translation of that last Spanish word. He’d given up on trying to keep rumors about the last mission from spreading, but he was in no mood to let things get out of hand. His promotion to CAG was recent, but anyone and everyone knew the value of morale.
Morale Fisheye was currently destroying.
“They should know what we’re up against, che,” Fisheye protested. He saluted, though, and McAllister knew the pilot’s protest wasn’t sincere. He looked at the group, and then back to McAllister. “Che, boludo, Why weren’t we in the first group?”
Che, boludo. McAllister had learned months ago that Fisheye calling him “swollen balls” was actually an endearment. “What, you wanted to be.…” McAllister snapped his fingers, echoing Fisheye’s earlier gesture. “Jodido? Screwed?” He gave a grin at the others when they laughed. “I’m sure the bastards would oblige.” He headed for his locker at the edge of the room.
“Naw, we’re just.…” Fisheye clapped a couple of the other pilots on the shoulder and hurried after McAllister. He settled into a chair nearby. “We’re on the flagship, you know? Should’a been us, che.”
“Like they were gonna send the flagship in for an early battle, guns blazing?” McAllister leaned in, keeping his voice low. “You know they aren’t planning anything until Mercury is ready. They must have found something big. But you know we’re gonna get our shot. It’s not like the admiral’s own ship is going to miss the show when we take Earth back, right?”
Fisheye snorted in agreement. Unbelievably skinny, with a shock of blond hair and the palest blue eyes McAllister had ever seen, the young man had found his way to the Rebellion from far-flung Pluto, and he’d never lost the look of some alien creature that had climbed out of the depths of the ocean, translucent and blinking. How he’d wound up looking like that, with a name like Hernandez and Argentine heritage to boot, McAllister had never figured out. Hell of a pilot, though, once you got used to having someone who looked like a ghost on your team.
“What’s going on?” Tocks settled in behind them and leaned close. “Telling secrets about me?”
McAllister reached out to clasp her hand, then bump it in greeting, nodding as Princess, a rough-looking stubbled man, settled in beside her. The two were practically inseparable—they even looked like twins, even though they shared no family and had grown up on different stations: same thick brown hair, same black eyes, same olive skin. Originally, it had been Nick who had the nickname Tocks, always following the plan rigidly, pointing to his watch, and Rachel who was Princess—and then Fisheye had pointed out it would be funnier the other way around, and the names had stuck.
Nick had taken it well, after an initial bout of sullen mumbling and profanities.
“Just about your curious affinity for a dude that looks like your brother.” McAllister leaned in toward her, eyebrows waggling slightly. “So? You into him? He into you? Come on, we need a distraction.”
She smiled-lopsidedly, flipped him off, and said nothing.
“Right….” He grabbed another chair and sank into its sagging cushion. “Ok. Earth. How much do you know?” McAllister raised his eyebrows as he stared directly at the two newcomers.
“Nothing.” Tocks gave a sweet smile. “No one on your crew would gossip, LT.”
McAllister gave her a look. He’d been given strict instructions by the admiral not to let his crew spread rumors about what had happened on Earth, but both of them had known even then that it was impossible to keep that sort of news from spreading. For a fighter crew, gossip about other crew’s mission was like candy. Or crack.
The door opened and Admiral Walker walked in. Everyone went quiet and jumped up to their feet.
“Just ... do your best to look surprised.” He threw the words back, pitched low, and snapped into a salute with the rest of them.
“At ease.” The admiral laced her fingers behind her back, taking a moment to look them over. “By now, I’m guessing that all of you will know what occurred on Earth several hours ago.”
There was a shame-faced mutter of agreement, and McAllister relaxed. The admiral wasn’t mad. That was good—she might be five-foot-nothing if she stood up very, very straight, but she could be more imposing than anyone he knew.
She was an arresting figure, with eyes like fire and steel, even when calm, but now that he knew this wasn’t going to be an angry meeting, McAllister couldn’t keep his eyes on her any longer.
Not with Commander King standing at her side.
His eyes traced over King’s small, straight nose, the heart-shaped face, black hair bound back in a braid and struggling to escape. She stared straight ahead, her at-attention pose perfect, but her cheeks took on a slight tinge of pink—she could feel him staring, clearly.
“—imperative that you follow the instructions of your CAG.” The admiral’s voice drew McAllister back to reality, and he looked over just in time to meet her gaze and nod seriously.
Fisheye elbowed him in the side, grinning—he’d caught McAllister staring. McAllister shook his head, glaring a reminder. Of the pilots in the room, McAllister was fairly sure that only Fisheye, Tocks, and Princess knew about him and Commander King, and he wanted to keep it that way. For one thing, the admiral wasn’t one to tolerate this sort of thing. She’d have him shipped off to some other vessel in a second if she knew what was going on.
“Any words you’d like to say, Lieutenant?” The admiral was staring at him now, her face so bland that he wondered if she’d seen him staring, too.
“Yes. Thank you.” He leaned forward so he could sweep his eyes around the room. He didn’t dare look at King again. He knew his smile would give him away, if the discreet bulge in his pants hadn’t already. Whatever he did, he absolutely could not, must not, think about how she felt this morning, stifling her laughter against his shoulder in the showers—
He cleared his throat.
“We’ve seen some
of the tricks the bastards have up their sleeves now.” He nodded at them and shot a glance at the admiral. “Sorry for my language, ma’am. Fuggers, not bastards.”
She only nodded, holding back a smile. There was one thing you could always count on with the admiral: she hated the Telestines more than any of them. “Rat bastards will be fine, Lieutenant.”
He grinned. “But this doesn’t change anything,” McAllister continued. He met the eyes of the others, holding each gaze until they nodded. Fisheye, Princess, Tocks. The handful of other pilots. “We didn’t get into this because we thought we had better tech than them, right?”
There was a nervous laugh.
“We got into this because we know we’re worth more than this. We know that if we train hard, if we go in there like I know we can, we’re gonna blast ‘em out of the sky and we’re gonna take back Earth.”
The cheer from his pilots made him grin.
“So we go back out today and we train.” McAllister jabbed his finger at them. He scanned the back row for more nods. “We remember the ones who were lost. We honor their sacrifice. And we get ready for the Big One. You with me?”
The cheer came again, pilots stamping their feet, and McAllister nodded to the admiral. His smile faded slightly at the look on her face, but grew again as his gaze drifted past her to King. The woman was smiling, biting her lip as she clapped for his speech, and he knew she was thinking exactly what he was thinking. They’d talked about it in whispers, in her quarters: no more stolen moments, no more ships or stations, no more frickin’ protein rations that tasted like fishy cardboard. Someday they’d built a real life together.
On Earth.
“Thank you.” The admiral’s voice cut over the cheering and she waited for it to die down. “As your CAG has told you, the next step, for now, is training. We’re still reviewing the data from the last mission, and—” She broke off as an officer slipped into the room and came to whisper in her ear. “What?” Her voice was low, but McAllister caught the sudden anger there.
