by M. G. Herron
Harmony had also been there on Captain Ruidiaz’s last mission. The AI had charted the jump course that carried them behind enemy lines. They landed on the Kryl homeworld—no one knew the Kryl word for it and Solarans were loath to name it, so most people just called it Planet K—where their intelligence operatives said the Queen Mother was located. Their objective had been to drop an antimatter bomb on the Queen Mother’s lair, then jump back to Imperial space before they were spotted.
The mission did not go according to plan.
On the Paladin, Kira shut her eyes and pinched her temples between her thumb and middle finger as she fought back the tears of anger that threatened to rise up. Even more than a decade later, the memory stung. Intelligence had only given them a partial picture of the landscape. The lair had an extra layer of protection they hadn’t anticipated, a giant shield of Kryl carapace that had been grown over the top of it like a buffer against the sky. They were forced to drop into Planet K’s oxygen-rich atmosphere. Against Kira’s recommendation, Ruidiaz dove low to deliver the payload. The Kryl, of course, defended their Queen Mother vigorously. Ruidiaz ejected, saving himself while his Scimitar plowed into the Kryl’s defenses—but the anti-matter failed to detonate.
Kira refused to leave him behind, for she knew Ruidiaz had survived the ejection. Against orders, she touched down and went searching for him, nearly being overrun by an avenging clutch of Kryl sentinels.
Though she found him, Ruidiaz refused to retreat until the objective had been attained. He took the payload from his downed Scimitar and insisted on delivering it himself. She waited for him and—Earth damn him—she actually believed he would come back.
But he didn’t. The detonation lit the night sky and she knew in that moment that he was beyond saving. And though she felt this horrible knowledge in her heart of hearts, Kira didn’t want to leave. Survival instinct took over as the sentinels closed in, going berserk with rage. To save her own life, Kira had been forced to leave him behind.
She knew that was why she really gave Captain Osprey permission to go after Captain Nevers. The captain had been surprised. But if there was even the slightest chance the young pilot was still alive on Robichar, she had to let Osprey do everything she could to find him. It’s what she would have wanted, were she in the captain’s position. Kira would forever regret not trying harder, not risking more, to bring Ruidiaz home. Even after every sign pointed to his demise. Wounds made by regrets and what-ifs had a tendency to rot and fester. Kira hadn’t left a soldier behind since Ruidiaz, and she didn’t intend to change that now, not so long as there was a chance.
All Captain Nevers needed was a chance.
Kira took a deep breath and blew it out. “Young and talented I may have been. I was also a naive fool.”
“Yet you have not lost hope.”
“Depends on the day, Harmony. Depends on the day.”
Kira turned her eyes back to the viewscreen, which showed the Mammoth fleet and the battle with the Kryl hive beyond. Though perhaps battle was the wrong word. The starfighter squadrons had been ordered to use fly-by, hit-and-run tactics to harry the enemy while reducing the risk of a direct conflict. It was working well enough to buy them some time, while also delaying the Kryl’s descent to the planet, which gave the captain more time to find her missing pilot.
But Kira noticed now that the hive had begun to try to land some of their larger ships. They were taking enormous losses to their drone numbers to do so, even sustaining damage to make it down to Robichar.
She didn’t understand it. She didn’t know why they were so bullish to set down on this moon. She had almost fooled herself into believing they weren’t interested in destroying the Mammoths when a swarm of drones separated from the bulk of their force and came screaming in their direction.
“Incoming bogeys!” Colonel Volk shouted. “Deploy defensive perimeter. Ready anti-ordnance laser defense array!”
“Harmony, connect me to the first two Mammoths in the jump sequence.”
“Yes, sir. Channel open.”
“This is Admiral Kira Miyaru of the Paladin of Abniss. Have you finished charting your courses?” They damn well better have, she thought.
“Yes, Admiral.” The voice of the female captain on the other end of the line breathed a sigh of relief. “Should we initiate the jump?”
“Do it.”
This was the Mammoth that had been hit with a torpedo before. She wanted to get them to safety first, to avoid any risk of them getting hit again. They’d made hasty repairs, and a second torpedo would effectively obliterate any chance of escape. The possibility that a damaged craft would be ripped to shreds in hyperspace was too high to take the risk. So they went first.
Half the starfighter squadrons that had been flying defensive patrols around the two dozen Mammoth longhaulers arced toward the incoming cloud of drones. Harmony identified two dozen torpedos that the drones had already released, drawing red boxes around them in the main viewscreen. Kira couldn’t help but clench her jaw as the Sabre pilots chased the torpedoes, taking them out one by one with their blasters and targeted missiles. The drones kept coming.
“See you on the other side, Admiral,” the Mammoth captain said. “Jumping in 5… 4… 3… 2…”
Two Mammoths at the apex of the fleet, which had drifted hundreds of kilometers apart as they plotted their individual hyperspace jump courses, blurred in the viewscreen, seeming to drag and speed up at the same time, elongating and then streaking into a series of white lines, like stars in stasis.
In a blink, they were gone.
Two down, twenty-two to go.
“Two Mammoths clear,” Harmony reported.
She contacted the next set of longhaulers and repeated her orders.
“Take out the rest of that incoming ordnance!” Colonel Volk shouted into a microphone that connected with the Sabre squadrons as he paced across the bridge before the viewscreen. “If a single piece of shrapnel scars one of my Mammoths, you dogs will be running recon missions at the edge of unknown space until the Fleet forces me to retire or I die of the heart attack I’ve been expecting for years.”
Kira fought down a smirk as the other officers on the bridge turned away and covered their mouths with hands. A little humor was good at a time like this. So was a little punishment-inspired fear.
The laughter died when one of the Sabre pilots miscalculated, veering into the path of a torpedo. His shot was good and the torpedo he’d been going for blew up halfway to the Mammoth fleet, but he was too slow to avoid the one coming behind him, which locked onto his heat signature and blasted the pilot and his Sabre into dust.
“Earth end you, I did not give you flyboys permission to turn this into a kamikaze mission!”
She let Colonel Volk rave and rant at the pilots as they chased the torpedoes and eliminated them one by one. No more pilots were lost, thankfully, and Kira was keeping a tally in her head. They’d already suffered more casualties on this mission than even Harmony had predicted, and she would be grilled on why that was when she got back to Ariadne.
Two more Mammoths jumped into hyperspace.
Twenty left, Kira thought. Hurry up, Captain Osprey. We’ve lost too many good pilots. Don’t you dare make me leave another one behind.
Twenty-One
Elya had never wished so badly to have Hedgebot by his side. As he banked the skimmer bike around a massive tree with sprawling branches, thicker than most of the trees that made up this tall forest, he spied movement in the underbrush. With his heart in his throat, Elya pulled up short, spun around and drove back the way they had come.
“Where are you going? He went that way.” Heidi gripped his waist with a ferocious strength that bruised his ribs.
Elya ignored her. He may not have Hedgebot, but by this point he knew where the other bike was headed.
“Groundlings,” he said.
Elya parked the bike, grabbed Hedgebot’s lifeless frame, then dragged Heidi off the bike and over to the thick
tree they’d passed a moment ago.
She seemed exasperated with this unexpected setback, but followed his instructions anyway, climbing the tree and sitting herself in the first branch.
“Up,” Elya whispered. “Go higher.”
She climbed up three more thick branches until she was hidden in the canopy, her face shielded by leaves. Elya perched next to her with a finger to his lips.
Heidi opened her mouth to protest, but clamped her mouth shut over top of the words.
He pointed ahead and mouthed, “Watch.”
They didn't have to wait long. In a few minutes, a groundling prowled into view. They watched it through a break in the leaf cover as it lifted its head and sniffed around.
If there was one thing he'd learned about these creatures over the last maddening day of fight and flight, it was that they seemed to navigate mostly by smell. The groundling sniffed the air and looked around.
Though it obviously had some idea that they’d been there, it couldn’t locate them. It looked up at the tree but didn’t see them. The groundling sniffed toward their tree, then around the skimmer bike.
They waited, tense, until the groundling lost interest and loped away. Elya expelled his breath.
“How did you know it was there? Did Hedgebot tell you?”
Elya hefted the bot’s dead weight in his palm. “No, he’s still off. But maybe some of his behavior has rubbed off on me over the years.”
She snorted. “Oh sure, you can smell danger.”
“Actually,” Elya said, “I just recognized where the other bike was headed.”
He’d been turned around, disoriented, at first. This had just been another pathless part of the forest, but as they followed the other bike, he came to the conclusion that there was only one place the priest could be taking Hedrick. He didn't know why or what Father Pohl’s plan was, but it was the only thing that made sense.
“Come on, let’s see if we can get a little bit closer.”
Heidi took a deep breath and exhaled. “Okay.”
They scurried down the tree and made their way carefully forward, tiptoeing softly and trying to make as little sound as possible. They were poorly armed for such a situation. Elya’s blaster had been taken when Charlie hit him over the head and pushed him into that hole in the ground. And Heidi had stolen the bike in such a rush that she hadn't taken any weapons of her own. So here they were, two unarmed people sneaking up on a compound controlled by the Kryl.
Whenever they saw movement ahead, they stopped and waited quietly for the groundlings to scurry by. There were dozens of them patrolling this forest.
“We need another distraction,” Elya said, “Or some way to get through.”
“Where did the other bike go?” Heidi asked. Elya didn’t know. What he did know, however, was that the Kryl were patrolling the encampment much the same way a squadron of starfighters would patrol around the Mammoth fleet. Therefore, it was logical, even for a Kryl, that they would be patrolling inside a certain radius from the encampment.
So Elya took his bearings and ranged out, trying to stay the same distance from the encampment as that tree had been, and circled around the place.
“Finally, a little luck,” Elya said when he spotted the other skimmer bike. It had been abandoned and leaned up against a tree trunk.
Elya popped the lid of the storage compartment and it was all he could do not to whoop in victory. He found a set of power tools inside, the kind that would be used to repair the skimmer bike if it somehow got damaged or disabled on a ride.
“I’ll give the priest and his followers credit for one thing,” Elya whispered to Heidi, keeping his voice low, so as not to attract unwanted attention. “They know how to be prepared. They’re all alone on Robichar now—or at least that’s what they think—and if anything happens, they can’t rely on somebody else to come get them. So it’s sensible to carry a repair kit in the skimmer bike.”
“Why wasn't there one in my bike?”
“Probably because the one you stole hadn’t been prepped for travel. I’m sure they only have a certain number of these kits and they probably don't just keep them in the bikes all the time. Whoever took this one came prepared.”
Elya lifted the repair kit. Beneath it, they found an extra water skin, rations, and a rough brown blanket. While Heidi ransacked the supplies, Elya took the repair kit several feet away to a clear spot on the ground. He laid out the blanket, set Hedgebot down and dumped out the repair kit to get a better look at the tools.
It's got to be around here somewhere, he thought. Ah! Here we go.
He found a little plastic bag with spare contact plates—little metal discs for mounting a battery onto a computer—and brackets. Also, a handheld welding torch.
“Thank Animus for standardized parts.” These brackets were larger than the ones installed on Hedgebot, but if he could get them to fit they should work the same.
He examined Hedgebot, placing the little guy’s battery beside him. As he’d seen before when he examined it, there were deep grooves on the bot’s underside, as if somebody had taken a screwdriver and jammed them into the metal plates, damaging the connection between the battery and Hedgebot’s central processing unit. All he really needed to do was get that power flowing again.
Thankfully, the battery hadn’t been damaged, just the contact plates and brackets. If he were still stuck in that hole in the ground, Elya wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. But with the repair kit there was a chance that he could bring the bot back to life.
Elya carefully removed the damaged hardware. Then he took new contact plates from Hedgebot’s hidden stash of spare parts and fitted them on. After that, he took the oversized brackets from the skimmer bike’s kit and welded them to the bot’s underside. It was bulky, and the brackets stuck out too far, but it was workable.
Elya reconnected the battery, took a deep breath and glanced at Heidi. “Here goes nothing.”
He held in the two buttons that would reset Hedgebot. For a moment, there was no reaction and Elya thought he had done something wrong. But then Hedgebot wriggled in his hand, beeped in a very sleepy, confused sort of way and peered around. Elya hoped that the bot’s memory hadn’t been damaged. Would he recognize Elya? Would he obey his commands? Would all the programming he’d added for Sabre repair and maneuvering, all the custom code he’d spent so many hours writing, be lost?
“Aww,” Heidi cooed. “Hi little guy. Welcome back.”
Hedgebot chortled in digital tones, spun, tripped over the power unit which bulged out from its belly because of the oversized brackets. It beeped a questioning tone at Elya
“Sorry, bud. You’ll have to make do with it for now.”
Hedgebot’s reply came across as sarcastic and slightly annoyed, yet somehow still thankful. That was the Hedgebot he knew and loved.
Then the bot reared up on his hind legs—or rather one leg and one peg—and peered about. Its glow returned then, a faint shimmer at first and then a blue nimbus that could barely be seen in the afternoon sunlight.
“All right, bud. Here’s the thing,” Elya said. “We’ve got to sneak back to that Kryl encampment and find Hedrick.”
Hedgebot cocked his head as if to say, Are you out of your Earth-blasted mind?
Maybe he was.
But if the priest had left this bike here, there was only one place they could be going on foot. Elya and Heidi needed to see whether the boy-shaped figure he’d spotted on the bike was, indeed, Hedrick. And if so, try to scheme some way to get him back.
“I know. You’re right. This is crazy. But what choice do we have? We need your help. Lead us through the forest and keep us away from the groundlings.”
Hedgebot shook himself, fiber-optic bristles flaring out. Then it scurried ahead in the direction Elya had indicated. Its programming was good, it seemed. It was still listening to him. And it still had its personality, which was, after all, a mirror of his own.
“Be as quiet as you ca
n,” Elya said, “and stay close. We may have to backtrack quickly.”
Together, they made their way forward, padding softly through the forest, setting their feet down on soft loam and roots wherever possible. Each time he or Heidi accidentally snapped a twig or stepped on brittle leaves, Elya tensed and his body broke out in a cold sweat. They made their way forward a hundred yards before Hedgebot glowed red and they had to run back the way they had come.
They waited with their backs pressed against a tree as a groundling appeared and sniffed where they had been a moment before. They waited until Hedgebot’s orange-red glow had faded to yellow and finally blue again. When the bot indicated that the path was clear, they continued to pick their way forward, moving east and then west to avoid the layers of patrolling groundlings, but inching ever forward.
They had a couple more close calls, but Hedgebot never led them astray. At one point, when a groundling came close enough to smell them, Hedgebot darted twenty meters in the opposite direction and scurried up a tree. They took advantage of the distraction and crawled forward, leaving the bot to fend for itself.
The fence finally came into view. Hedgebot rejoined them a few minutes later, having evaded the groundling.
Elya looked around. The priest must have been out of his mind to come here. Elya knew he possessed some kind of protection from the Kryl, so maybe it wasn’t as crazy an idea as it may have been otherwise.
They didn’t see the priest at first. Elya did spot two sentinels in front of the prefab building that they had identified as being guarded earlier that day. The damage to the fence that they had caused was nearby. Elya saw now that it had been patched with more of that sticky webbing. The Kryl did quick work.
But where was the priest?
“Elya,” Heidi whispered, “Look.”
