Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thirty years ago, back when Davin Gantrell had first founded New Keledon, the engineers had planned for a potential evacuation. The first residential area had been built in a wide, spacious cavern intended to make it easy for the inhabitants to flee in a reasonably organized manner, and the city’s original charter mandated that the docks always hold sufficient astral-capable ships to carry the population to safety in an emergency. There were even holos of the first inhabitants testing out the evacuation protocols, right down to who was responsible for carrying what. Selaris could still remember watching them as a child and giggling at how ridiculous her then twenty-something father had looked in his white jumpsuit and oversized protective visor.
But that was a long time ago, and as it turned out, evacuating a few hundred humans was considerably easier than evacuating fifty thousand aliens. The Ghallar transports her father had brought in a decade ago should have been more than up to the challenge, but unfortunately they, like so many other things in the city, had fallen victim to casual complacency. And now it might have been too late.
For all of them.
“The first transport is nearly full,” Selaris said. “They should be leaving within a few minutes.”
“Good,” Thexyl replied as his thin reptilian fingers danced across the diagnostic console. The other techs were busily installing a giant metallic cylinder just off the main power core. She hadn’t a clue in the galaxy what it was, but even to her untrained eye it didn’t look like the part belonged on this class of ship. They must have scavenged it off of one of the smaller shuttles.
“The soldiers are doing what they can to maintain order and organize the rest of the people,” she went on. “I think everything will hold together right up until the point they can actually see the cruiser bearing down on us. And if it starts firing…”
“The city’s shield grid is impressive. It should be able to withstand considerable punishment, especially now that the lower levels are evacuated and we’ve rerouted all remaining power up here.”
Her face tightened. “If they get close enough to fire, I don’t think it’s going to matter. The city might survive a few hits, but the transport won’t.”
A shimmer of orange rippled down his neck. “No.”
Selaris sighed and glanced over to the other side of the docks. Given all that had happened recently, it was nothing short of a miracle that the evacuation was proceeding at all, let alone in a reasonably organized manner. The people of New Keledon had gone through the arrival of an enemy operative, a heated battle on the concourse, and then an attempted coup. They had little reason to trust their leaders at this point, and when the Council had finally given the order to evacuate, Selaris had fully expected an all-out riot.
But to her pleasant surprise, almost everyone had cooperated with remarkable efficiency. Members of wholly disparate species had aided one another in packing up their modest homes and gathering their families, and now they were standing here on the docks, waiting more patiently than she ever could have imagined. Even the disaffected groups of non-humans who’d once called for Vale’s blood had been mostly silent; Revask seemed to have convinced them to fall into line quite nicely.
It wouldn’t last, of course. Once the crisis was over she fully expected the yelling and screaming to return with a vengeance, and once some of these aliens actually set foot on Mire outposts…well, suffice to say it wasn’t going to be pretty. But for now, none of that mattered. For one desperate moment, the bonds her father had doggedly tried to build between the races seemed to be holding. Perhaps it spoke well of the future when the Convectorate had fallen and a new, truly allied government was primed to take its place.
Assuming, of course, that any of them survived the next hour.
“Mr. Thexyl, sir,” Thomas stuttered as he came racing off the lift from the engine room. “We have a problem, sir.”
The Kali tilted his head to face him. “What is it?”
“I was just doing a final check on the engines when I found this.”
He handed Thexyl a datapad, and a fresh patch of orange rippled down the alien’s neck. “I see.”
“What’s wrong?” Selaris asked.
“There’s a series of micro-fractures along the engine casing,” Thexyl said. “The entire unit will have to be replaced.”
A lump formed in her throat. “How long will that take?”
“Assuming we can find another similarly-sized casing—which I suspect is highly unlikely—it will take at least two hours to install it.”
“Two hours?” she breathed. “That battleship will be here any minute!”
“Technically, we don’t need the sublight engines to fire up the astral drive and shift away,” Thomas pointed out. “We could still get out of here and then make the repairs in normal space.”
“We could, but there would be nothing stopping the Tarreen from shifting over and destroying us right then and there. The transport needs to be able to hit a jump corridor when it reaches normal space in order to escape, and preferably two or three so it isn’t tracked.”
“Oh, right,” he mumbled sheepishly. “Sorry.”
“There has to be something else we can do,” Selaris said. “Some way we can speed up repairs.”
Thexyl’s scales shifted black. “You should go to your shuttle and leave, Your Highness. There is nothing else you can do here.”
“I’m not leaving,” she told him pointedly. “Not until we get the rest of these people out of here.”
His yellow eyes flicked over to the growing horde of people gathering outside the transport. “You are the last member of the Gantrell family. You owe it to your people to survive. Regardless of what happens here, they will need a leader in the future.”
“Keledon was destroyed a hundred years ago, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Selaris snapped. “And we both know that I’m no leader. I’m a middling telepath and a Mire puppet.”
“In the past, perhaps, but that will change. Your species is fond of symbols, and if nothing else you could be that for them—the queen who refuses to die, even when all hope seems lost.”
She rolled her eyes. “I thought Kali were supposed to be rational, not poetic.”
“It isn’t poetry—it’s psychology. Humans often require symbols to motivate them.”
“I said forget it. I’m not going anywhere.”
Selaris folded her arms across her chest and turned back out to the horizon. She couldn’t see the Tarreen vessel through the astral mists just yet, but the Golem and the other ships in their meager fleet would soon be blasting off to meet the enemy head-on.
“Markus and Vale might still buy you the time you need,” she whispered. “He seemed confident that the Phoenix would have a chance to do some real damage.”
“Perhaps,” Thexyl replied, though his voice lacked conviction. “If you aren’t going to leave, Your Highness, then I will suggest you speak to the people and convince them to remain calm. As you said before, the situation will deteriorate rapidly once the city comes under fire.”
Selaris tried to swallow the lump still clogging her throat, but it refused to budge. “All right.”
She stepped over to the lift leading off the transport, her eyes fixated on the shield generators jutting out from the asteroid like metallic claws. Fifty years ago, the entire system had been revolutionary. No one had ever conceived of a true colony in astral space before, and yet somehow her father had made it happen. He might have died young, but he was an honor to the Gantrell legacy. Unlike his daughter, whose sole contribution to their heritage would be to watch it burn to ashes around her.
She clenched her jaw as she hit the lift controls and waited for it to slide up to her. When Markus had first mentioned the Phoenix, a part of her had wanted to be out there with him fighting in the battle despite the danger. It was a stupid notion, of course—she had never flown a ship in her life. But at least it would have made her feel like she was doing som
ething. Instead she was doomed to sit here and stare helplessly at the silhouette of the city’s buildings on the horizon as everyone else fought the battle in her stead.
The buildings on the horizon…
“Wait a minute,” Selaris said, spinning back around. “You said we diverted all remaining power to the shielding grid in this section, right?”
Thexyl’s head bobbed in a rough approximation of a nod. “Yes.”
“What about the defensive turrets? I know we haven’t had enough extra energy to run them in a while, but with almost everything shut down…”
“Hey, yeah,” Thomas said, nodding frantically. “They should be able to handle any fighters that slip through the blockade, anyway.”
“We didn’t have time to run proper diagnostics on their systems, and they’ve been inactive even longer than these transports,” Thexyl pointed out. “It’s unlikely that many of them will be able to fire.”
Selaris shrugged. “Some are better than none, right?”
“They will also draw power from the shielding grid, which in turn will limit the number of hits the city will be able to absorb. I considered this earlier, and I don’t believe the tradeoff would be worth it.”
“We have to do something, and there’s no way you’re getting this transport to fly in time,” she insisted. “If we’re going to get blown up anyway, personally I’d rather go down shooting.”
Thexyl swiveled his head towards the techs as they finished mounting the giant cylindrical device. “I will tell the others to keep working. Perhaps with the turrets we can hold out long enough for them to finish.”
“All right,” Selaris said, reaching out to grab Thomas’s hand so she could drag him along with her. “We’ll contact you once we reach the power core.”
The Spider and the Fly Page 58
