“You must drink this, Jarek Slater.”
Jarek frowned down at the drink in question and back to Drogan before slowly taking the bottle. “I take it this isn’t lemon-lime?”
“It did possess a greenish hue, if that pleases you.”
“Ick.” Jarek made a face at the ominous bottle. “Not really, no.”
“You must heal.”
“Yeah …” Jarek looked around, searching for some excuse.
Drogan did have a point. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this beaten up, and Maker knew how long they had before he’d be needing to rumble again.
“Is everyone else getting a dose of the Stumpy Special?”
A faint look of amusement crossed Drogan’s face. “Everyone else does not get beaten so frequently and thoroughly as you.”
“Uh, thanks?”
“Drink, Jarek Slater. Prepare your body.”
“Man, I know you don’t mean that sexually, but …”
Drogan was already stalking off.
“Wait,” Jarek called. “Is this, like, safe?”
Drogan just kept walking.
“I’m very particular about my complexion!” Jarek called after him. “If this stuff gives me scales, Stumpy, I swear to—yep, he’s gone. Great.” He eyed the bottle suspiciously. “Well …”
He braced himself and took a pull.
It didn’t please him. It didn’t please him one damn bit, and the squeeze bottle didn’t really help with the whole chugging thing, either. But he’d probably had worse.
He downed about half the bottle, then braced himself again and walked over to Alaric as the two soldiers wrapped up their business—without much success, it seemed—and hurried off.
Alaric didn’t turn to face Jarek immediately. At first, he thought the commander was bracing himself. Then he started to wonder if Alaric even realized he was standing there, or if he’d simply checked out for good somewhere in the middle of listening to his men prattling on.
Finally, though, Alaric turned his head, showing Jarek the left side of his face and one downcast, bloodshot eye.
“Spit it out,” he said quietly.
Jarek pointedly looked around at the crowd. “Not here.”
Alaric gave a neutral grunt, like he’d been expecting Jarek’s answer but didn’t quite care enough to make a move.
Jarek waited quietly.
Finally, Alaric heaved a heavy sigh and turned in full. “Fine.” He waved Jarek on. “Lead the way.”
Jarek picked his way through the crowd, rehearsing unsatisfactory lines in his head and doing his best to ignore the curious looks that followed them through the tunnel. More out of familiarity than anything else, he steered them in the direction of the showers where he and Rachel had spent the early afternoon. Where he was headed, he didn’t precisely know. Just away from the crowd.
He was thinking about trying the reservoirs he’d seen marked past the showers earlier when Alaric caught him by the shoulder and spun him around with a dark frown.
“Where the hell are we going? I’ve got more important things to be doing than taking a stroll with you.”
Jarek let the words roll off him like the emotional overflow he knew they were. “You’re allowed to be hurting, you know.”
The words took Alaric by surprise, enough so that he recoiled slightly. “My son hated everything there was to hate about me. And now he’s dead. You’re seriously stupid enough to think I’m not hurting?”
“Oh, I know you’re hurting,” Jarek said with a surreptitious glance back down the tunnel.
Several soldiers were watching them from the outskirts of the crowd twenty yards away. Jarek ignored them and turned back to Alaric.
“Which is why I thought I’d better point out that you’re not doing anyone any favors trying to put on the Brave Commander face right now.”
Alaric started to say something, but Jarek held up a firm hand for silence.
“And it’s not true, what you just said about him.”
“The hell it isn’t,” Alaric growled. His face worked, twitching somewhere between a snarl and a grimace.
He looked like he wanted to hit someone. Anyone. Didn’t matter who as long as he could transfer an ounce of his pain off his plate.
Jarek found himself wishing for the second time that the commander would take a swing at him. That somehow Alaric’s angry fists could validate the guilt that’d been sitting in Jarek’s gut since they’d drove away from that farmhouse and left Mosen to die for them. Since before then, even.
But that was the self-pity talking. He knew that. Just like he knew there was nothing to be gained and no one to be helped by indulging it.
For both of their sakes, he needed to get his shit together and hold it there.
“He asked me to tell you something,” Jarek said.
Alaric watched him with the silent look of a broken man, caught somewhere between desperate anger and bone-deep sorrow.
Just tell him …
“He wanted me to tell you that he was sorry,” Jarek started slowly. “That he was … afraid. Angry too. Angry at you, at the raknoth, at everything. But mostly just afraid. I think he always wanted to tell you, but …” He glanced back at the curious onlookers, who all scurried hurriedly back to their business. “We should talk about this somewhere else.”
Alaric didn’t seem to hear the last part. He was dead still, and when he spoke, his voice was barely a creaky murmur.
“Seth said all this?”
For a second, Jarek thought about telling him the truth—that he was only extrapolating what Mosen had wanted Alaric to hear. Looking at Alaric’s hunched shoulders, though, he couldn’t bring himself to sink one more dagger into the man’s ribs.
“He did,” Jarek said quietly.
It was what Mosen had wanted to say. He was sure of it.
Wasn’t he?
Some part of Alaric saw through his white lie—Jarek was almost certain of it—but the rest of him must’ve been so desperately overcome with grief that it was willing to overlook the detail for now.
So Jarek took a dry swallow and pushed on. “I tried to talk him down, Alaric. Tried to tell him we’d find another way, but …”
Alaric finally unfroze and crossed into the next tunnel to sink onto a shipping crate and bury his scraggly face in his hands. “But there was no other way,” he finally murmured into his palms after a long silence.
“No.” Jarek followed and cautiously sat beside Alaric. “I don’t think there was.”
Alaric’s eyes were bloodshot and utterly defeated as they searched Jarek’s face, weighing his words and his intent.
“He still loved you, Alaric,” Jarek said quietly. “Somewhere in there.”
Alaric couldn’t quite seem to figure out how to react to that, so, for a while, they sat in silence.
“That’s one hell of a shiner you picked up, there,” Alaric said after some time.
Jarek shot a questioning look at him, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his gut.
Alaric watched right back, his bloodshot eyes unreadable. Finally, he tilted his head back the way they’d come from. “Heard a few of the boys talking about their adventures on the road.”
Jarek held Alaric’s gaze, searching for some hint of what he was driving at. “There were disagreements. And a few good punches.”
Alaric bobbed his head, his gaze distant as he turned that tidbit over.
“What did Seth wanna do?” he finally asked. “What was his plan if he wrestled the group from you?”
It was unnerving, how clearly Alaric seemed to see the events unfolding from what few details he’d gathered. But, Jarek reminded himself, he was here to support the man and to help him understand how his son had felt at the end. Not to stand trial for Seth’s death.
“I’m not so sure he really had a plan,” Jarek said. “Short of making sure the cheeky asshole in the exosuit didn’t get his men killed.”
For a second, the lines
of Alaric’s frown lightened marginally, and his lips moved in the ghost of a humorless smile.
It didn’t spread to his eyes.
“I think,” he said slowly, rising from the crate and turning to face Jarek from a standing position, “that the two of you might’ve been more alike than you’d like to realize.”
Jarek dropped his gaze to the floor, unable to meet Alaric’s eyes. “Yeah … The thought occurred to me once or twice out there. Among others.”
Conner’s bloody, grinning face flashed through his mind unbidden.
All of them pushed to violent action. All of them so damn certain they were the one seeing things clearly …
“You wouldn’t have been at that farmhouse,” Alaric said quietly. “Not if he’d been the one calling the shots.”
His words cut through Jarek like a scalpel, so fine and swift that he couldn’t fully appreciate the damage they’d done until the blood began to well along the wound.
He clenched his jaw, fighting the words on the edge of his tongue.
He wouldn’t apologize, no matter how loudly his guilty heart screamed for him to do so. No matter how urgently his emotions insisted that he throw himself at Alaric’s feet and beg for his forgiveness.
Because that was the point, wasn’t it?
It didn’t matter that he was sorry. Seth was still dead either way. Just like the other five they’d lost back at the farmhouse were still dead too. And just like the rest of them were still alive.
Jarek had made his decisions. He’d done his best. And now he’d live with the consequences of those actions. The good and the bad.
So he forced himself to meet Alaric’s eyes, and he told him what they both needed to hear.
“It was the right call.”
The rest of the words couldn’t seem to unstick themselves from his throat. That, right call or not, every part of him would always go on wishing everyone could’ve survived. That, faced with the situation again, he would’ve made the same call, even now. That, above all else, he’d do everything in his power to never let anyone down again, knowing damn well that he was aiming for the impossible.
Alaric watched him silently for a long time, looking more than anything like he was trying to rekindle the anger that seemed to be burning out of him with each passing second, leaving nothing but profound weariness in its tracks. After what felt like half an eternity, he gave up and turned to leave.
He didn’t make it more than half a step, though, before he paused and slowly turned back to Jarek.
“You remember what I told you? Back at HQ, right after those boys were fixing to jump you in medical?”
Jarek forced himself to hold Alaric’s gaze. “I remember.”
Alaric nodded to himself, his eyes far away. “You’re learning,” he said quietly.
Then he left.
Jarek watched him go, silently cogitating on what Alaric meant by that. He couldn’t quite decide whether he really wanted to know or not.
“You are right, sir,” Al said quietly in his earpiece. “From a logical standpoint, following the leads to Columbus and then to Cheyenne were the best of the available choices for maximizing our chances for long term surviv—”
“You don’t have to tell me, Al,” Jarek said. Then, less aggressively, “I appreciate it, buddy, but … I don’t know. Surviving and being right aren’t exactly synonymous.”
“Rightness is hardly guaranteed in any action when we are discussing anything so subjective as human morality, sir,” Al said. “Within those tenuous guidelines, I believe the best one can do is to simply strive to act as one they deem a good person would.”
“Hmm. Most interesting. I think you might have me confused with Pryce, Mr. Robot. Objectively.”
Al ignored the comment.
“You are a good person, sir. As far as I understand the premise.”
Jarek smiled. “Well if my robot says I’m a good little boy, it has to be true, right? Just like when Mommy and Daddy said they liked my finger paintings.”
“I’m sure they did, sir.”
Jarek chuckled and shook his head,
“What will you do about Alaric, sir?” Al asked after some time.
“I don’t know. Stay out of his way, I guess. And let him have his shot at the rakul when it’s time.”
“Something tells me that that time is not far off, sir.”
Jarek chewed his lip, absentmindedly watching the soldiers ahead—some eating, some maintenancing their equipment, many preparing to bed down for their first full, proper night of sleep in far too long.
It was too good to last.
“Something tells me you’re right, Mr. Robot.”
28
It was a pleasant enough planet, Vermaga decided. As much as anything was pleasant anymore, through the stale lens of far too many cycles. The inhabitants of said planet, though …
The World Ender had been wise to target Earth all those cycles ago. These humans. These nefarious little bipeds who pranced about with their feeble weapons.
For now, they were nothing. Held firmly in their helplessness by indignation and willful ignorance. Not yet intelligent enough to understand what they could one day become. Not yet.
But one day they would be. Or would have been, rather. That was entirely the point of the harvest, after all.
Vermaga had watched from the mountaintop for a day and a night now. He hadn’t twitched a single unit, save for the ones below—those pieces of himself with which he’d been busy at work, dividing, spreading, commandeering.
He could still feel the odd bubbles there, the ones the craftiest of the humans had somehow constructed to bar the way to his extended senses. A curiosity, to be sure, but it hadn’t stopped him from communicating with the pieces of himself below. There was nothing sensory about that.
It was simply what the humans had once spoke in hopeful whispers of as quantum entanglement, and to Vermaga, it occurred as naturally as their breathing.
At least whoever had constructed the barrier—he suspected the female that that wretch, Gada, had warned them about—had attempted some form of resistance. And then there was the armored one and his pathetic band of fighters.
True, the clan of the one who slew Kul’Armin had been utterly inept in allowing Vermaga to slip a few spies among their group and track them all the way from the land of Pittsburgh. But, to their credit, they’d put up a noble struggle back at that crude country house once Vermaga had learned of their allies’ location here at Cheyenne and given Ogrin and Gada permission to destroy the convoy.
At least they’d fought.
The same could not be said of the rest of the humans below, who even now danced like sad little puppets to his every thought.
Yes, in a few more of their millennia, these humans might have become troublesome. But for now, it was regrettably easy.
Perhaps he and his brothers should have taken their time in coming to Earth.
Once they’d realized the extent of their confounded underlings’ treachery, though, allowing the traitorous raknoth of Earth to escape punishment any longer had been out of the question. It simply would not do, allowing the other factions to believe such wayward disobedience could ever be met by anything other than the full might of their Masters.
So, Vermaga had set each tiny bit of himself in position to destroy the sad final bastion of these humans and his younger kin, and then he had waited for his brothers.
They came as Earth’s sun approached the horizon and painted the dark sky a mournful streak of red.
Kul’Fraga and Kul’Vaish. The Dagger and The Wraith.
Vermaga had no great love for either of the cutthroats. Then again, few of the Kul had any great love for much of anything anymore. No strong feelings at all, truly, with the possible exception of their current shared disdain for that meddling sapling, Gada.
It mattered not.
They were simply here to complete the work and restore order. Which meant Fraga and Vaish were exactly the Kuls
for the job.
“You are ready inside, brother?” came Fraga’s silent question.
No matter how many times he heard it, the sound of Fraga’s voice, mental or spoken, never ceased to strike Vermaga as unexpected.
It was simply too thick for a creature so small.
The little gremlin fingered his dark blades, silently reminding Vermaga to move on with it.
“Wait,” Vermaga sent.
“The others will be here soon,” Fraga said.
Vermaga ignored his brother’s reminder and concentrated. Nearly half a mile below, the piece of himself he’d set to wait in the vent dropped down into the isolated storage room he’d picked out hours ago.
The rest of him stirred below, the pitiful servants he had infected throughout the base glancing up in confused anticipation, sensing their moment was fast approaching but not yet comprehending how or why.
“The way is clear,” Vermaga thought toward his brothers.
Fraga grabbed onto Vermaga’s proffered appendage and glanced back at Vaish. “You are prepared, wall-walker?”
Vaish only continued to watch, swirling with nebulous wisps of apathy, as he always did.
Vermaga had always suspected the prolonged quantum uncertainty involved in Vaish’s shifting would inevitably touch his mind. He had not been wrong.
“Splendid,” Fraga sent.
And with that, Fraga was gone. Or not gone, really, so much as no longer there.
Vermaga felt him below already, standing over his smaller self in the storage room, waiting.
“Tell the wraith to hurry it up,” Fraga sent.
Vermaga turned his senses back to the mountainside only to find Vaish had already gone, shifting down through earth and stone as readily as if it were thin air.
“Tell him yourself,” Vermaga thought back.
“As if he’d give a damn. Yes, I’m talking about you, wraith,” Fraga added as Vermaga felt Vaish shift from one side of the humans’ mysterious telepathic bubble to the other.
Vaish, unsurprisingly, did not reply—merely ghosted his way to Fraga’s location and glanced around as if he could see through the base’s walls, drinking in the numbers and locations of his imminent victims with his senses.
Retribution: Book Four of the Harvesters Series Page 25
