by Joshua James
“I’ll be damned,” Ace said, looking around slack-jawed.
“Hate to break it to you,” Ada said under her breath to Ace. “But all of them are damned if they think they can attack those Shapeless dreadnoughts.”
Ada knew she should’ve been happy to see so many survivors already organizing a counterstrike. Their fighting spirit should’ve galvanized her. But she couldn’t shake the image of Francesca’s face from her thoughts. How many more like her were down here? All of them, probably. Every last one of them.
“So who’s in charge here, Greyston?” Engano asked again.
“He’s right over here.”
“Let’s go,” Engano said. “You too, Saito.”
“Me?” Ben asked. “What do you need me for?”
“Just get over here,” she said; then she turned and waved on Greyston to continue leading to meet the officer in charge.
Ben looked back at Ada, who shrugged. She had a feeling that Engano wanted Ben around as a bargaining chip. The son of Lee Saito meant nobody was leaving her out of the loop. At least, based on how calculating Engano had been so far, that’s what she assumed. Ada found it exhausting to look at the world as a constant game of one-upmanship, but that seemed to be Engano’s only view.
“Somebody needs to keep an eye on her,” Ada offered.
Ben frowned. “I do not volunteer,” he said, but then he turned to follow Engano anyway.
“Left behind again,” Ace said. “As usual.”
“Good,” Ada said, scanning the room. “Underestimated is a good thing. See if you spot a ship or something so we can get outta here the first chance we get.”
“I like your optimism,” Ace said. “You think we can just walk around here, eying up ships like this is a big shopping mall?”
“And guns,” Ada said.
“Somebody’s going to stop us,” Ace said.
“With that attitude, yeah.”
“What are you—”
“Ace!” Ada snapped. “Nobody knows us here. If you look like you belong, nobody’s going to stop you. Take Tomas. At least he looks the part.”
Ace glanced over at Tomas. “What about it? Want to go look for big toys?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Tomas said.
He turned toward the ships lined along the far wall of the hangar, easily slipping in between two groups of officers and disappearing. Ace awkwardly followed after, looking like the kid who just raided the cookie jar.
“I give ‘em five minutes, tops, before somebody stops them,” LeFay said.
“I’ll take that,” Ada replied.
“I think I might make a little exit myself,” LeFay said.
Ada frowned at her. She might have Ace and Tomas looking for insurance equipment, but she wasn’t contemplating leaving the bunker anytime soon. This looked a helluva lot safer than anywhere else they’d been on Vassar-1. “Where are you going?”
“To find Agent Moreno,” LeFay said. “I still owe her.”
“You saved her life, yeah?” Ada said. “What kind of debt isn’t paid back by that?”
“If we both live to see each other again, I’ll tell you. For now, look after your group.”
Ada snorted. “I haven’t been doing too great a job so far.”
“It’s a damn alien invasion,” LeFay said. “You’re not dead. You’re doing great.” She punched Ada on the shoulder hard enough that Ada knew it would bruise. “It’s Benny-boy’s job to blame himself for stuff nobody asked him to worry about. You’re too smart for that self-pity shit. I think you know who you need to worry about here.”
“Engano.”
“Bingo,” LeFay said. She pulled a nicotine cartridge from her shoulder pocket and popped it in her mouth as she walked away. When she reached the hallway that led back to the bunker entrance, she paused and turned around. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Sixteen
“What are your capabilities, Greyston?” Engano asked as they headed across the hangar.
“I’ve had some basic flight training, but I’m probably not much use in a real dogfight. But I aced my sharpshooter—”
“In the facility, Greyston,” Engano said, feeling the huge vein in her forehead throbbing. “Why would I care about your personal capabilities?”
“Ah,” he said, followed by silence as he furrowed his brows and seemed to contemplate if Engano would ever actually care about his personal capabilities.
Engano glanced around, genuinely wondering if anyone would care if she killed him. She could just reach out and strangle him. It would be so easy. She pictured the stupid oaf, tongue dangling out as he lay on the ground, neck snapped, shitting himself. She smiled at that image in her mind.
Greyston smiled along with Engano. “That makes sense,” he said at last.
Before she could fully express how little sense Private Greyston made in the greater scheme of the universe, Ben spoke up. “This place is huge,” he said, looking around the hidden hangar.
“It should be,” Engano said. “We spent a trillion credits on it once upon a time.”
“I’ve never seen some of this equipment,” Ben said.
“We don’t like to overshare with the UEF,” Engano said. “So I’m not surprised.”
“I know your equipment pretty well,” he said. “I studied AIC tactical equipment extensively.”
“Good for you,” Engano said. “But I’m sure you studied current tech. Nothing in here is less than fifty years old.”
Ben shook his head. “Fifty years old?”
“If not older,” Greyston said. “This was all built long before the Great War.”
“Are you sure the Shapeless don’t know about this place?” Ben said to her.
“No,” Engano said bluntly. “That’s why we need to hurry.”
“The Shapeless?” asked Greyston.
Engano waved his question away. She had enough of a headache already without trying to educate Greyston on that topic. “What about those capabilities, Greyston?” she asked. “The facility capabilities,” she reiterated.
“Hard to say for sure, ma’am,” Greyston said. He was walking double-time just to keep up with her, even though he was ostensibly leading the way. “We got about forty fighters in the short hangar. Mark-10s.”
Ben coughed. “Mark-10s? As in Mark-10s?” He pantomimed a fighter stick bucking in both hands.
Considering it was a miracle Engano had Greyston on topic, she didn’t really need Ben interrupting every second. “Beggars and choosers and all that,” she said.
“I suppose,” Ben said, shaking his head.
If Greyston understood the back and forth, his eyes didn’t show it. He continued as if there hadn’t been an interruption. “A little older, sure, but still flightworthy. Well, mostly. Hence the need for all this maintenance. These old buckets of bolts need a little loving before they’re ready. Then we have two troop transports. A general’s cruiser—”
“A general’s cruiser?” Engano asked. “In here?”
They were quite large, maybe half the size of a dreadnought. She hadn’t expected one here. It could be useful.
“Not a full-sized one,” Greyston said. “It’s a little bit bigger than a raider-class ship, meant to look like a luxury liner. It was meant to transport VIPs undetected in case of something, well, like what’s going on here.”
As they walked, Engano realized something important. All the AIC ships were being loaded with traditional weaponry. They had on board cannons, missiles, and bombs: all of which would be effective against UEF ships, yes. Maybe they’d work against the Shapeless versions as well. But against the aliens themselves, they were almost useless.
She glanced at Ben. “If you had to choose one weapon against the Shapeless, what have you seen work best so far?”
“Fire,” Ben said without hesitation. “Cold works, but it’s hard to generate. Electricity and explosives seem to work on the basis that they both generate enough heat to hurt them. I’ve perso
nally seen even fully-transformed Shapeless lose their form with heat applied.”
Engano didn’t know exactly what he meant by ‘fully-transformed,’ but she could make a guess. She turned back to Greyston. “Do you have incendiary weapons?”
“Pardon, ma’am?”
“What part of that didn’t you understand, Greyston?”
“Uh, well, I mean, sure. We have firebombs, I think. But I’m not sure—”
Greyston stopped talking when he realized that Engano had stopped. “Madam Director?”
“Are those hell-gel bombs?” She was pointing at a long line of racked bombs with red stars lining both sides.
“Yes,” Greyston said. “We haven’t had much use for them since the war conventions outlawed them.”
She turned to Ben. “Well?”
The hell-gel bombs had been gruesome back in their day. That the colonies had actually used them against each other in interplanetary wars was a sad footnote in expansion history that everyone wanted to forget.
The gel bombs were an organic-compound-based, liquefied weapon designed to slow combustion and release energy over a longer time than any of the standard explosive weapons that had been in use at the time. The hell gel adhered to surfaces and resisted suppression. It was a gruesome way to literally melt your enemies away where they stood, and the ferociously unpredictable delivery system made them all the more dangerous.
“That would be great if we were trying to bomb them,” Ben said.
“Delivery systems can be altered, Mr. Saito,” Engano said.
“Um,” Greyston interrupted. “He’s just there,” he said, pointing at the front of an office at the opposite end of the hangar. “If you want to stay here, I’ll let him know you’re here.”
“You do that, Greyston,” Engano said, trying and failing to mask the sarcasm in her voice. Greyston seemed oblivious, but then again, that was his default setting.
Engano and Ben patiently waited. They were quiet at first, but then the Intelligence director broke the silence.
“You look just like him, you know. I mean, I haven’t seen him since we were both much younger, but…you really are his spitting image.”
“You knew my father?” Ben asked her.
She nodded, but before she could say more, Greyston came back. “He’s ready to see you.”
“How wonderful,” Engano murmured.
When she opened the office door a moment later, she wasn’t surprised at who she found there.
Seventeen
“I should have known nothing would kill you, Senator,” Engano said. “You old cockroach, you.”
“I could say the same of you, Madam Director. How’d you happen to find yourself here? I heard your team died out in the Bowery.”
“No such luck, LeFleur.”
Engano glanced at Ben, and saw how the last name hit him like a slap. She’d been well briefed on his interactions with the Perseverance.
“And who might this poor soul you managed to rope along with you be?” asked LeFleur. He held out his hand for Ben to shake.
“This is Ben,” Engano said. “Ben Saito.”
Some of the color seemed to bleed out of the Senator’s face. “Ben…Saito?” LeFleur held Ben’s hand awkwardly. “Son of Lee Saito, that Ben Saito?”
“That’s the one,” Ben said quietly.
“I believe you knew my daughter,” LeFleur said at last as he released Ben’s hand.
Engano could feel Ben squirming, and decided to let him off the hook for the moment. She needed that conversation to happen, but not just yet.
“That’s nice,” Engano said coldly. “Now, Senator, what’s the plan here?”
LeFleur considered her coldly in return. “The plan? It’s simple. Since I escaped that damn convoy and made my way back here, we’ve been arming and preparing for a counterstrike.”
“You don’t have enough ships or manpower to down any of the dreadnoughts.”
LeFleur nodded. “Bad odds, no doubt. But our people, the citizens of Vassar-1 and the AIC in general, need an example to rally around.”
“So your plan is to martyr yourself?” Engano asked. “Allow me to not sound impressed.”
“If that’s the way you want to put it. But I prefer the idea that we’re not going down without putting up a proper fight.”
“A proper fight,” Engano scoffed. “This isn’t a gentleman’s duel, Harrison,” she said. “Besides, I watched the proper fight. It ended with our home fleet falling back to the dirt like so much burning scrap metal.”
“We couldn’t properly coordinate—”
“They did little to no damage and ended up dead. Do you feel invigorated, galvanized by their sacrifice? No? Do you know why? Because it was pointless.”
“Pointless?” Senator LeFleur asked, his voice rising with rage. He stood and came around his desk.
For a moment, Engano thought he was going to take a swing at her. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had tried it. Not many people tried a second time.
“Look out there.” LeFleur pointed at the windows of his office, which looked out on the subterranean docking bay. “All of them, every single last one has lost people today. They’ve lost their homes, loved ones, entire lives. What am I supposed to tell them? That we’re going to turn tail and run? That we’re gonna hide until the danger passes? No. I can’t do that.”
“It’s still suicide, Harrison,” Engano said. “It’s a terrible idea.”
“Don’t talk to me about suicide,” he shouted. “If your people hadn’t failed us, Madam Director, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“But we did fail!” Engano said, slamming her fist down on the table. She took a long, deep breath. “We did fail. I failed. I failed to understand the nature of the threat. I failed to understand the best way to counter it. That first-wave attack was pointless for that reason, and wasteful.”
LeFleur cocked his head as he slowly walked back behind his desk. “What’s gotten into you, Heather? You’re not one to admit failure, at least not in so many words. You’re too politically savvy for that.”
Engano snorted derisively. “May I never be so savvy again.”
“So what is it you’re proposing, Madam Director, if I may be so direct? You say our plan is suicide. What’s yours?”
“Two questions,” Engano said by way of answer. “One, you have working tech down here. Does that mean you have communications? Maybe the ability to send a message off-world?”
LeFleur shook his head. “Network is down even if we could penetrate whatever jamming they seem to have. We could try and slip a data probe past them, but that won’t get us help for weeks.”
Engano had expected as much. “Second question. Can we use the planetary weapon?”
LeFleur looked genuinely shocked. “Within our own atmosphere? That’s impossible.”
“Have you looked into it or not?”
LeFleur locked his jaw. “Yes. The weapon is locked into a single target, and you know what it is.”
“Earth.”
“If we could get their ship over it and if they were high enough in the atmosphere that the weapon could actually coalesce into a tight enough beam to damage them, we might be able to use it against them.”
“All righty, so we’ll put that one in our back pocket,” she said.
LeFleur cocked his head. “You seem awfully chipper for a person contemplating the end of our world.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Harrison,” Engano said. She rose to her feet. “You have your talk with junior here. I need to go chat with your engineers. Time is working against us.”
Ben looked like he might choke.
“Just tell him the truth,” Engano said. “He deserves that much.”
Eighteen
LeFleur took a couple of glasses out from one of his desk drawers as soon as Engano was gone. “Please, sit down.”
Ben took a seat, then took a moment to really take in the office. It was quite old-fashioned. It looked like
something he might’ve seen in a museum fashioned after the twenty-first century.
“Do you know what I want to talk to you about?” LeFleur produced a bottle of whiskey and opened it. “Before you answer, I know that you’re former UEF. Part of me wonders if you still are. Perhaps you’re a spy, like the Director out there? Maybe you work for her?”
“Like a double agent?” Ben stifled a laugh as he said it. He chalked it up to nerves. He could face down enemy ships, shapeshifting aliens, and gun-toting terrorists, but a father grieving for a daughter that he’d had a hand in leading into a trap? That was something else altogether.
“Something like that,” LeFleur said, pouring whiskey into one of the glasses slowly, deliberately. “Yes.”
“No, I assure you I’m not a double agent.”
“That so?” LeFleur poured the second glass of whiskey. “Then how is it that you and your crew escaped my daughter? You do know my daughter, correct? Captain LeFleur and her ship, the Perseverance?”
“I did meet her,” Ben said. “She captured us.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know the exact coordinates off the top of my head, but we were where the Atlas came out of their fold jump.”
“Drink? Looks like you need it.” LeFleur was calm. He picked up one of the glasses of whiskey and offered it to Ben.
Ben, for the first time since surviving the crash of the Lost, glanced down at his clothes. He was covered in dirt, gun grease, and Clarissa’s blood. His hands weren’t much better. He could only imagine what his face looked like.
“Yeah, maybe more than one. Thanks.” Ben took the whiskey and took a sip. It was a pleasant burn in his mouth and down his parched throat.
“So.” LeFleur poured another. “Why were you out there? Looking for the Atlas?”
“Looking for my father. I…I had a hunch that he might be in trouble, that his ship and crew were flying into an ambush.” Suddenly Ben could picture the small hyperdrive. He still had it. Even with all the commotion and chaos, he’d managed to hang onto it.
