by Rachel Bach
The black glossy eyes stared at me for a second, and then Rupert’s familiar accented voice sighed. “We really have to stop doing this.”
“Shit,” I said, scrambling off him. “I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”
It was a stupid question. If Sasha’s bullets could hurt symbionts, my life would have been a lot simpler. That didn’t stop me from examining Rupert’s chest for injuries, though. When I was satisfied I hadn’t broken anything, I slugged him in the arm as hard as I could. “What the hell were you doing, sneaking up on me?”
“I wasn’t,” Rupert protested, rubbing his arm. “I’d been looking for you for a while when I heard the alarms. Emergencies and Devi tend to go together, so I came over here to check it out. I’d just spotted you when you shot me.” His chest flexed, and the scales covering his head fell away, revealing an almost sheepish expression. “I was coming to rescue you.”
I couldn’t help a grin at that one. “Well, you’re about fifteen minutes late,” I said, offering him my hand. Rupert took it, and I pulled him up, though his weight made me stumble. I always forgot how much heavier he was than he looked. “Where are your big guns?”
“This way,” Rupert said, running down the hall back in the direction I’d come. “I left them with Mabel.”
I ran after him, matching his pace with effort. My suit is fast, but symbionts can move. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go far. A few turnings down, Rupert ducked into a small room I’d dismissed as a dead end and opened a panel on the wall. He motioned me inside, and I went, ducking into the dark. When I came up again, I was nose to snout with a xith’cal. Fortunately, it was the one I liked.
“Hyrek!” I cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Mabel sprang him when she escaped, along with the rest of the crew,” Rupert said, coming in behind me and replacing the panel. “We couldn’t navigate this place without an inside man.”
Once again, I am reduced to translator, Hyrek typed into his com. Clearly, Mabel had also gotten everyone’s stuff back.
I looked at Rupert in his symbiont scales and then at Hyrek. “I’m guessing you’re in on this, then?”
One does not work for the captain as long as I have without picking up a few things, Hyrek replied.
“I’m always the last to know anything,” I grumbled, looking around at the place Hyrek had been hiding. It looked like we were in some kind of maintenance tunnel, but the scale was wrong for xith’cal. I could stand, but Rupert had to stoop, and Hyrek was bent nearly double. Also, it was filthy, the walls smeared with dirt and grease like hundreds of people passed through here regularly, which seemed odd for a tunnel inside a wall. “What is this?”
A slave road, Hyrek replied. They run all through the ship. But we need to get out of here quickly. This whole area has been locked down for quarantine.
“They’re treating your escape as an outbreak,” Rupert said. “If they didn’t need you alive, they’d already be spraying the whole sector with neurotoxin.”
Hyrek shot me a wary look, and I raised my hands in surrender. “I didn’t plague anything,” I said. “And I’m not going to, either. That shit is dangerous. Let’s just get out of here. I’ll tell you what happened when we’re safe.”
Hyrek nodded and started down the tunnel, clicking his handset as he went. A second later, a message appeared on my camera as he patched himself into my suit. This way.
Before I could follow him, Rupert’s arm slipped around my waist. “I’m so happy you’re all right,” he whispered, his voice warm as he hugged me tight.
He let me go before I could tell him to get his claws off me, which was absolutely what I’d been about to say, even though the phrase forming on my tongue had felt more like I’m glad you’re okay, too. But that couldn’t have been it, because I wasn’t saying that sort of thing to Rupert anymore.
Fortunately, my near miss went unnoticed. Rupert was already jogging down the tunnel after Hyrek, his black clawed feet as silent as falling leaves on the grubby floor. I followed a few seconds later, keeping my eyes firmly on my sensors and absolutely not on Rupert’s muscles as they shifted under the smooth scales on his back, which for some reason didn’t seem nearly as alien or creepy as I remembered. Not that I was looking, of course.
Considering how busy I was not looking, it was a very good thing the tunnel was empty. The slave area must have been evacuated for quarantine, too, because I didn’t pick up so much as a flicker of a heat signature until the tunnel we were following let out into what looked like a storeroom. It was only after Hyrek slowed down that I saw the first sign of life. Three of them, actually.
Directly opposite our tunnel, three thin, filthy men were sitting on crates watching what looked like a gladiator match on a battered screen set into the wall. If it wasn’t for all the xith’cal writing, I’d have thought it was a Paradoxian game, but none of the figures fighting on the floor of the huge stadium were wearing armor. I was zooming in with my own cameras to try and see what sort of blood sport was awful enough to qualify as xith’cal entertainment when the bird’s-eye shot of the fight vanished, replaced by a close-up of Caldswell.
I barely stopped my squeak in time. The captain was standing tall at the center of the arena, facing down three xith’cal warriors alone and apparently unarmed. His face and clothes were bloody, as was the sand at his feet. All around him, the massive stands were packed with roaring lizards. The three lizards in the arena roared back, digging their claws in for a charge. That was all I saw before Rupert pulled me behind a wall of boxes.
“They’re slaughtering him,” I hissed, yanking my arm out of Rupert’s grasp.
“I know,” Rupert said calmly. “But there’s nothing we can do. The captain’s spectacle is actually the only reason we’ve been able to move through the ship so freely. Let’s not waste it.”
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit. Caldswell and I had our differences, but he’d always been a brave man. He didn’t deserve much, but he’d definitely earned a better end than being tortured to death for the xith’cal’s amusement.
That said, Rupert had a point. It wasn’t like I could help Caldswell anyway, so though it sat wrong in my gut, I followed Rupert down a little tunnel hidden behind the boxes, out of sight of the glassy-eyed human slaves watching the captain’s death. Hyrek was already waiting at the end, holding open a little door much like the one we’d used to enter the slave road.
We came out in a hangar. It was tiny compared to the huge dock the Fool had been towed into, but it was still big by my standards. This was clearly a nonmilitary facility, though, because all the ships here were blocky and unarmored. They were also surprisingly small.
Female ships, Hyrek typed at my questioning look. This is the bay for the laboratory division, the one that is currently shut down for fear of you. As a result, we were able to secure a ship with limited effort.
My eyes went wide. “We’re escaping in a xith’cal ship?”
“No other choice,” Rupert replied. “The Fool has a harpoon through her hyperdrive coil. She’s also in a hangar that’s under guard by a full troop of warriors.”
I was still staring when the closest ship, a boxy planet hopper a quarter the size of the Fool, opened up, and Mabel jumped down right in front of me. Like Rupert, she’d clearly given up all pretense. Her mechanic’s coveralls were gone, leaving her in scales up to her neck. Her graying, curly hair was pinned back tight, and her face was set in a serious scowl that left no trace of the pleasant, easygoing engineer. “Found her, I see.”
“She found us, actually,” Rupert said, nodding at the ship Mabel had hopped out of. “Are we ready to go?”
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” Mabel replied with a shrug. “Basil and Nova have things more or less worked out, and as soon as Hyrek joins them to translate the last few sticking points, we’ll be good to fly.”
“Fly?” I said, incredulous. “That’s your plan? Just fly out? They’ll shoot us on sight.”
Mabe
l scowled, but Hyrek beat her to it. Actually, he typed, Devi brings up a valid concern. Even with the distraction of the captain’s execution, if we try to launch from a quarantined dock, the security turrets will almost certainly fire on us.
I’d been thinking more of what would happen if we flew a xith’cal ship into human space, but that was also a good point. “Can’t you override them or something?”
Hyrek shot me a cutting look. I am a butcher turned surgeon for the lesser races. The security system for a tribe ship can only be handled by females who’ve completed five years of training. Overriding it is completely beyond my skill set.
“Right right, I get it, you’re a doctor, not a hacker,” I said. “Fair enough, but what are we going to do?”
“We could take out the turrets,” Mabel said.
I shook my head. “No way we could get them all. Have you seen this thing fire? It’s a ball of guns.”
“They’re outside, anyway,” Rupert said. “To disable them from here, we’d have to take out the firing stations, which are beyond the quarantine zone. We’d be up to our eyes in xith’cal as soon as we hit the first one.”
Perhaps a distraction? Hyrek typed. Something to keep them too busy to fire at us?
“We can do something about that,” Rupert said, looking at Mabel, who smiled and reached back into the ship. When her clawed hand reappeared, she was holding the two enormous missile cases I’d seen Rupert carrying back on the Fool.
“Charkov and I can play decoy,” she said, handing one of the cases to Rupert. “Hyrek, you get Morris out. She’s the only thing that matters.”
“What?” I cried. “No way. I have a better plan. Hyrek, how do we get to that arena?”
Rupert turned on me. “Absolutely not.”
“You haven’t even heard what I want to do,” I protested, but Rupert just crossed his arms over his chest.
“I don’t care,” he said. “You know how important you are.” He paused there, but the unspoken words hung in the air anyway, and I knew he wasn’t just talking about the virus. “We are not going to do anything that puts you at risk,” he continued at last. “And you are absolutely not getting within a mile of that arena or Reaper.”
I fixed Rupert with a glare that should have made him cower. He didn’t, of course. He just held his ground and glared back, which was exactly the wrong thing to do. Rupert should have known about me and challenges by now.
“How much longer do you think this area will be under quarantine?” I asked. “A weapon does no good if you can’t use it. As soon as they get brave enough, they’re coming in to get me, and then we’re all lizard food. I’m certainly not going to hang around here while you go off and be a hero, so you have a choice: you can either hear me out and be helpful, or you can get out of my way.”
I could almost see Rupert’s hackles rising, but I held my ground. When it was obvious I wasn’t backing down, Rupert sighed. “Fine, what is your plan?”
“Charkov,” Mabel said warningly, but Rupert held up his hand. I expected Mabel to bite his head off for that, but she just backed off, a sour glare on her face, and that was when I realized that Rupert outranked her.
I was digesting that bit of new information when I realized Rupert was still glaring at me, and I got to the point. “I can get us a distraction like nothing you’d believe,” I said. “But once it goes, we have to leave quick, and that will be a lot easier if we take the head off the tribe.”
“That sounds a lot like you mean to take out Reaper,” Rupert said suspiciously.
“I do,” I said. “And get Caldswell, and get out alive.”
“Caldswell?” Mabel said, eyes going wide. “Impossible. Brian’s dead, Devi. He knew it from the moment we got hit, and he would not thank you for trying to save him if it put you in danger.”
“I don’t care what he thinks,” I snapped. “I put a gun to my head to get that man to agree to meet my demands, and like hell am I abandoning all that work.” I turned back to Rupert. “You heard what he promised. Is there another person in the Eyes with the power to make all of that come true who would have agreed to work with me?”
Rupert set his jaw. “No.”
“Rupert,” Mabel hissed, but Rupert shook his head.
“I’m not lying to her anymore,” he said calmly. “You saw Commander Martin’s order, he wanted her sedated and restrained. Commander Caldswell disagreed. He wanted to work with Devi, and so do I. I’ll take full responsibility for whatever happens here.”
Mabel stared at him hard, and then she held up her hands in surrender. “Have it your way, but the captain is not going to like it.”
“Then he can bitch to me,” I said. “If Caldswell dies, I go right back to square one, and personally I’d rather die here fighting xith’cal than go back to the Eyes as a glorified virus holder to be sedated and restrained. Anyway, I’m the best weapon we have against the xith’cal right now. They can’t risk killing me or getting near me, which means I’m our best ticket out, and I’m not leaving without Caldswell.”
My determination must have been clear on my face, because Rupert’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “Fine,” he said. “I’m listening. What kind of distraction do you have that can free us, kill Reaper, and save the captain?”
From the tone of his voice, I could tell he didn’t expect to like my answer. And he was right. He didn’t.
“Don’t be such a lead weight,” I scolded as we followed Hyrek’s directions down the slave roads.
We’d been jogging for fifteen minutes, but we were still only halfway to Reaper’s arena. Even though I’d been in one before, it was easy to forget just how huge tribe ships were. Hyrek had said the arena was close, but “close” on a tribe ship meant nearly fifteen miles of tunnels. If I hadn’t had my suit and Rupert hadn’t been an inexhaustible alien monster, it would have been impossible.
“This is a terrible idea,” Rupert grumbled. He’d insisted on taking point, despite the fact that I was the one with the gun. I’d thought it was kind of sweet until I’d realized what a slow pace he set.
“Too late to change your mind now,” I reminded him. “In for a shot, in for the bottle.”
Rupert huffed. Despite his speech to Mabel, he’d flat-out refused my plan the first time I’d explained it, but no one had been able to come up with anything better before the alarms sounded to signal the end of the quarantine. After that, it had come down to fly out and get shot, fort up in the bay and fight the xith’cal until we were overwhelmed, or try something crazy. Since only one of those didn’t necessarily end in death, Rupert had ordered Mabel to guard our escape and struck off with me through the tunnels. He’d been grumbling ever since.
“Just stick to the plan and everything will be fine,” I said. “Now”—I pulled up my density monitor to study the knot of turns coming up ahead—“which way, Hyrek?”
Second left, scrolled the text on my screen. Then down the ladder, skip the first two passages, and follow the one that leads up.
“Such a useful lizard,” I said before reading the directions out loud to Rupert.
Maps are freely available on the tribe ship grid, Hyrek typed. Though if you wish to think of me as all knowing, I will not disabuse you of the notion.
“And so modest,” I added, rolling my eyes.
Try to keep away from the corridor coming up on your right, Hyrek warned, ignoring me. It leads to the slaughter rooms. Wouldn’t want you passing out.
I wasn’t afraid of a little blood, but I kept my eyes ahead all the same as we walked by the grim door. It was the tenth such room we’d passed. Hyrek had always been careful to warn us they were coming, and though I acted tough, I was grateful to him for it. Killing is one thing, but human slaughter is something else entirely, and I’d learned from my curious glancing into the first room that I had no stomach for it.
All the slave roads so far had been the same as the first: small, dirty tunnels running through the tribe ship like capillaries. Given the amount of
grime on the walls, I’d expected them to be crowded, but apparently all the slaves had been rounded up into the main pits near the ship’s core to watch Caldswell get slaughtered. According to Hyrek, the point of this was to keep the imbalance of power and their own helplessness fresh in the slaves’ minds. There were a few slaves left in the tunnels tending to jobs that couldn’t be put on hold, but they were as enraptured as everyone else by the gruesome spectacle on the screens, and we were able to sneak past them no problem.
I’d floated the idea of getting the slaves on our side, but Hyrek had nixed that instantly. Any slave, human or the aeons they kept in the feed pits, would reap huge rewards for reporting us, which meant none of them could be trusted. Still, I was happy they were all tucked away down in their bunkers. I knew what was coming, and I wanted the humans as far as possible when it hit.
All in all, the journey was much less hairy than I’d expected. The xith’cal’s complete dismissal of the “lesser races” they enslaved meant there were few cameras in the slave roads and no guards. In the end, we were able to make it all the way to our destination without a single fight.
According to Hyrek’s map, we were now in a tunnel that passed directly beneath the arena. It looked so much like every other slave road so far, I was a little worried we’d missed a turn, but then as we walked, I began to hear the roar of the screaming crowd through the metal over my head, and I knew we were in the right spot.
“How’s our boy doing?” I asked, scanning the tunnel’s ceiling with my density sensor for the place where the metal was thinnest.
Not so well, Hyrek replied.
“Not so well how?” I said, but before Hyrek answered, Rupert waved me over. He’d moved down the hall a bit and hopped up on a pipe to pry a panel off the ceiling. I jumped up to join him, putting my head through the opening he’d made. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, and then I realized that Rupert had pried the bottom off a ventilation grate. Through the metal mesh, I could see straight into the arena itself, and Hyrek was right. It wasn’t good.
