by Nick Webb
Walker looked heavenwards and prayed for patience.
“Pike.”
“One second.”
“No. Not ‘one second.’ This is a military operation. The Telestines are watching very carefully. The operations that got you on-planet, helped you at the lab, and tried to retrieve your shuttle later? They’ve put the Telestine fleet on alert.”
When he spoke, his voice was a jumble of emotion. “It’ll be okay. We can get in there alone.”
“I can’t allow you to try that.” She spoke sharply. “Good god, Pike, think for a second. If the shit hits the fan, you’re on a ship with no guns, and there isn’t a way in hell I’ll be able to get in there to help you in time.”
A long pause. He must have covered the comm unit this time, because she could hear only the faintest sound as he tried to persuade his companion of something.
“Pike. Pike.”
He wasn’t listening anymore. With an oath, Walker grabbed the comm unit and made for the door. They hadn’t gone far, and she was going to meet him at Earth, no matter what he said.
“All right.” His voice came back in her ear. “Look, what if you come in from one of the dark zones and get into the shadow of the moon? Stay on the far side, set down in Mendeleev Crater. Their satellites won’t be able to catch sight of you there. Maybe.”
“They might see us on the approach.” But it was a murmur, not a denial—and they didn’t have the resources for a full-scale battle again, unless they threw everything they had out there. “Can you give us any shielding on the approach?”
“Let me check.” It seemed as though his voice turned away from his comm. “Can you get the satellites not to see the fleet coming in, even if you’re not at the control panels yet?” A long pause. His voice returned, louder now. “Yes. That way you’ll be close enough to help, but not in their line of sight.”
“And you aren’t going to let me talk to her?” Walker rounded a corner and returned a salute distractedly as several junior officers fell out of her way.
“It’s not—you’ll understand when you meet her.” There was a pause. “Walker—I know this is a military operation, but you’ve already lost ships. You lost some getting me on the ground, too, didn’t you?”
“That’s not important.” She could hear the guilt in his voice.
“I’m just saying, if we can do this without risking the fleet, isn’t that worth a shot?”
“Pike....” The doors to the bridge slid open and she crossed into the room, uncomfortably aware that all of her crew had turned to look at her. “What is a fleet for?”
“But if you—”
“It’s time, Pike.” She heard the tremble in her voice and took her place at the desk. “If she’s what you think, the fleet needs to be at Earth to capitalize on that intel. Because once she does her thing, we might not get another shot.”
Silence.
“Right,” he said finally. “Promise you won’t get yourself killed, okay?”
“I promise.” The lie came easily.
“Right,” he said again. “See you on the other side. “
The call cut, and Walker looked up at her crew.
“Pike has made it off Earth.” She paused as a ragged cheer went up. “Better still, he believes he may have found something very close to the Dawning. He will be landing at the Telestine’s lunar military base to attempt to deploy it, and we will be on hand to get him out if it does not work—and capitalize on it if it does.”
“What did he find?” Delaney, ever practical, narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“A girl, raised in the Telestine labs. We believe she may have the capacity to interface with their technology.”
Delaney’s eyebrows shot up.
“Set a course for Earth. Maximum thrust.” She glanced at her command console, mentally doing the math for the million-kilometer trek from their hiding place in the glare of the sun past the L1 Lagrange point. Five g’s, nearly three hours.
“Ma’am.” Larsen swiveled around in his chair at the comm station. “Our contact on Venus is on the main line.”
Walker paused to consider this. She didn’t know his endgame. Or even his motivations. And she was tired of depending on someone else.
“Tell Mr. Tang,” she said finally, “that we do not require his assistance for now.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Venus, 49 kilometers above surface
Tang Estate, New Zurich
“Dammit.” Nhean slammed his hand down on the desk as the line went dead. His pulse was pounding. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
They’d told her.
This was a risk he’d taken, he reminded himself. Childhood friendships were strong, unpredictable, and Pike was more protective of the silent girl than Nhean had anticipated. If Nhean had just played a stronger hand, taken the precautions to hold them.…
But Pike was Earthborn. A Native. And a cargo runner. If anything would have made him a certain enemy, it would have been a cage of any sort. Locks on the doors, overriding the shuttle’s guidance systems—none of that would have done anything but earn the man’s enmity.
Nhean allowed himself a wry smile. He had been pleased when Walker put such a chaotic piece in play, and now it turned out she had gambled better than he thought. He shoved the thought away. He would not wallow. He had played this wrong, and all that was left was to regroup. He needed to count his assets and start again.
The shuttle tipped as Parees guided it through the storms near Nhean’s private estate, and Nhean glanced out the window at the airship, only partially visible amongst the clouds. He reached out to open a line on the comm unit.
“Parees, take me to the shipyard.”
“Yes, sir.” Parees changed the shuttle’s course without question.
Nhean looked back at the information on the desk in front of him. It still didn’t make any sense: he was seeing a sudden flurry of questions over the Telestine network, but no answers. Tel’rabim had disappeared from contact at the worst of times, although it was difficult to imagine that he would willingly give up information of this importance even if Nhean could contact him. It was one thing to sympathize with another species, and entirely different to admit to a military failure.
But this was maddening. No matter how many times Nhean went over what he was seeing, the same pattern always emerged: they were combing the area near the Rocky Mountains with increasing desperation, looking for.…
The Dawning.
That they were searching for it too was clear—but why, Nhean could not imagine. If it had been moved before the lab crashed, they should know where it was. If it had crashed on the lab, they should know where it was. More to the point, they didn’t seem to want anyone to know they were looking for it. The communications were heavily encrypted, and he caught references to stealth systems on the Telestine ships flying patrol. He’d looked at that part quite a few times, wondering if it was a mistranslation—perhaps they were searching for stealthed human ships.
They weren’t.
It all made sense, it all had a reason, it had to—but what? He forced himself to sit back in his chair as he considered.
Why did Telestine ships try to keep themselves invisible to their own kind? A power struggle within the Telestine military? Possible. A classified project? Also possible. The faction dispute—
“Sir, we’re approaching the shipyard.” Parees’s voice was entirely neutral. “Do you want to dock?”
“No. Hold us here.” Nhean strolled to the window. His shuttle was built in the same style as his estate: sweeping lines and floor-to-ceiling windows that were utterly impervious to the atmosphere, a feat of engineering humans had been trying to achieve for years. He waited for the clouds to shift, and his breath caught.
Before him lay one of the few sights that still moved him to awe.
The fleet hung mostly hidden in the atmosphere, appearing and disappearing in the swirl of the wispy upper clouds of the storms. They were nearing dusk, but work wa
s still going—he could catch the faint spark and glint of welding. The ships were sleek and fast, the sort one might mistake for Telestine transports, but they weren’t Telestine.
They were his—he had spent over half his fortune on them and called in most of the favors the elite owed him—and they were as close to perfect as he could make them. Their guidance systems were built to detect Telestine scans and adjust course accordingly. Their propulsion was finer tuned even than the Telestine wrecks he had recovered, and their life support systems were the most efficient ever seen. They could be remotely guided—a perfect weapon—designed to do the most damage to the opponent and the least to humanity.
And each of them carried the Seed—or would, as soon as he could be sure that it would work. The Dawning was his key, and the Seed ... the Seed was his revenge. Tel’rabim might speak of prosperity and equality, he might make entreaties for medicine to be delivered to the outer stations, but it was not enough. Humanity should not have to scramble for scraps, and when Nhean took down their computer systems one by one and dismantled their cities and loaded them onto ships, they would learn what they should have known from the start: as long as humanity existed, they would be planning to take Earth back.
His hands clenched and he let himself smile. The fleet was almost whole. He might have lost the girl, but there had been plans before her, and he could still use those.
Not to mention, the Dawning might still be up for grabs.
He frowned, and then his head turned sharply back to the desk. A thought was dawning.
“No,” he murmured to himself. No, it didn’t make any sense that the Telestine military had lost an integral piece of their technology. That was too … easy. It didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense at all.
Unless … the factional conflict. What if it wasn’t just a conflict, but a brewing war?
The whole of it hit him in an instant, and he didn’t even feel himself cross the room. It took him two tries to press the button.
“Get me back to the estate, and the get the admiral on the line.” His voice was shaking.
“Sir, the line isn’t receiving communications.”
“Then hack it if you have to.” Panic shortened his breath. “Hack it, do anything you have to, get us in contact with them and tell them they cannot take the lunar base. They must abort, and abort now.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Near Earth’s Moon
Tang Shuttle
“This was a bad idea.” Pike’s voice was barely a whisper.
The girl shook her head without looking over. She had not looked at him in nearly an hour. Her fingers were busy at the ship’s controls, sometimes moving dials for no reason he could understand and sometimes simply laying her palms flat on the screens.
Whatever she was doing, it was working, but unfortunately, “working” meant that their ship was now passing through one of the most intense concentrations of the Telestine fleet Pike had ever seen. Aboard the Aggy, they had been ordered away from Telestine military exercises in space—humans were not permitted to watch those—and he had seen, once or twice, the carriers that patrolled the solar system looking for violations of the treaty. Neither of those experiences were anything like this.
The shuttle’s camera telescope zoomed in on Earth—it seemed as if the entire Telestine fleet was hanging outside Earth’s atmosphere. Carriers. Dozens of them. Set like black dots against the swirl of clouds and oceans below—a hurricane was forming over the Atlantic—and the smaller ships swarmed around them like bees to a hive. Shuttles were carrying soldiers between the gunships and the carriers, fighters were flying patrol, and some of the smaller ships seemed to be practicing maneuvers in the empty space above the fleet.
Not a single one of them seemed to notice the human ship passing far too close to Earth. Good thing the shuttle was tiny, and black.
“This was a bad, bad idea,” Pike repeated.
The girl gave him a look.
Hours passed, and the blue globe shrunk as the gray moon loomed large in the front viewport. They swung around the edge and watched as the Earth dropped below the horizon, and before he knew it, they were almost there. He fiddled with the controls and managed to initiate the deceleration burn.
She sat up in her seat to watch as the lunar base approached and pointed to its three main docking bays. On three splayed fingers, she indicated the middle bay and gestured for Pike to take the controls.
“We’re landing at the base?”
She stared at him wordlessly.
Pike blinked at her. She blinked back.
“A bad, bad, bad idea,” Pike muttered to himself. There was a Telestine patrol crossing beneath them, black shapes silhouetted against the dark lunar surface, and he held his breath until they were out of sight.
He also held his breath for most of the docking process. The docking clamps came out gently to grab the ship and pull it in, and the ship thudded into place a moment later. A green light blinked at him to let him know a docking seal had engaged. Her eyes were closed, as if in deep concentration—had she done that?
It was this easy? It was actually this easy? He craned to peer at the computer systems and could not tell for the life of him what she’d done.
He glanced at her. “You want a weapon?”
She opened her eyes and pointed to his knife, her hand out, palm up.
“I suppose that’s fair if I get the gun.” He handed it over. “Do we go left or right when we get out?”
She shrugged.
“So you’re just going to wander until you find things?”
The look she gave him said this was mostly correct, and he sighed.
“All right. You haven’t been trained in combat, have you?”
A blank stare. He wasn’t sure if that meant yes, or no. Better err on the side of safety.
“So I need to go first.”
She blinked. She had apparently not considered this.
“Unless you’re actually invisible to Telestine eyes as well as their ships.”
She shook her head sadly.
“All right.” He held up two fingers and twitched them forward toward himself. “This means to go from wherever you are, to me. Until you see that gesture, you stay put. I’ll move ahead, and when it’s safe, I’ll make that gesture. When you get to me, you tell me where to go next, okay?”
She nodded.
“And for the record? I don’t like this.”
She spread her hands with a shrug. What other options did they have?
It was a good point. Pike motioned for her to stay where she was, and opened the docking bay doors below. They waited, breathing as silently as possible, at the edge of the hatch, listening for any change in the bay outside.
The footsteps into the bay were immediate; someone had been waiting for them. Pike caught the girl’s eyes and held a finger to his lips for silence.
Her grin was just as impish as it had been all those days ago, and a moment later, he realized the foolishness. He stifled a laugh and held up a hand for her to stay.
There was only one set of footsteps, slowly circling the ship. Pike retrieved his knife from the girl’s hands and crouched down as carefully as he could. He must not make a single sound. The Telestine knew something was wrong. He had to die instantly, before he could call for help. Though the fact there was only one might mean they were short-staffed.
The alien came around the bend near the stairs and the knife left Pike’s hand the same instant. It caught the Telestine in the throat and he went over backward, clutching at it, eyes wide with shock. He was dead before he hit the floor and Pike threw out an arm to keep the girl in place. If anyone else had heard....
Seconds passed. Ten, then twenty. Pike counted slowly against the racing of his heart.
No one else seemed to have been there to hear the thud, but Pike still took the stairs carefully, wincing at every clang. He searched the body carefully, took what looked like an ID card and the Telestine’s rifle, and gestured
to the girl to follow him.
This is too easy, the voice at the back of his mind whispered.
In the hallway outside the docking bays, she paused to consider, and went to examine a computer terminal on the far wall. She stared at it for a very long time before nodding decisively and jerking her head left. Her gestures showed him a path: the second right, and straight on from there.
Pike looked around himself before answering. “How far?”
She held up her thumb and forefinger a scant distance apart.
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Pike.” Walker’s voice was soft in his earpiece. “Are you there?”
“Yes. She thinks the access point to the defense grid is close.”
There was a pause, and he could see Walker biting her lip in his mind. She got protective at times like these. When she said, “Good luck,” he could hear every entreaty she wanted to say, but was holding herself back from. There was a pause. “We’re nearly to Earth—nearly done with our decel burn—and we’re keeping an eye on their fleet. I’ll tell you if it looks like anything’s happened.”
“Right.”
They could hear the distant sound of activity above them, but this floor seemed to be empty. The girl guided him quickly down empty hallways and past cross corridors while Pike looked up frequently and prayed for the Telestines to decide that the docking bays didn’t need patrols.
The dead end was sudden. A white wall dropped down in front of them with a hiss, opaque and shining slightly in the light. There wasn’t so much as a millimeter for him to wedge his fingers into. It was—what was it? An airlock door?
Pike swore with all the inventiveness of a cargo hauler. When the girl nudged him out of the way, he was still swearing. He had not come this far to stop here.
And then she laid her hands flat on the wall and it lit up like Christmas.
Pike stepped back with an oath. Her head was bowed, her eyes closed, but her fingers were moving. A green line followed her right index finger, and tiny blue lines trailed from the fingers on her left hand. They moved like an orchestra conductor’s, drawing patterns he could not see the whole of, and the computer panel flashed and glowed in response.
