The vid paused as Debrett’s voice said, “They flew for half a hantick before finding this.”
When the vid resumed, the image had changed to a small riverside property surrounded by gardens. It appeared idyllic until the cam zoomed in and revealed the shattered windows and debris, along with a series of holes stitched along the entire front wall of the house. They looked as if a driller had been hunting for food—a very large driller, with a beak capable of punching holes the size of an Alsean’s fist completely through the brick structure.
“Thermal sensors located four bodies inside. They were killed recently enough to still register, but barely.” Colonel Debrett was still speaking offscreen, but Micah could hear the anger in his voice. “Our pilots found this scene repeated in home after home as they flew downriver. And then they came to this.”
Micah clenched his fists when he saw the footage of the riverside village, or what was left of it. There had been perhaps fifty homes clustered on both sides of the river, with a small bridge connecting them. Every one of them was now either a blackened wreck or still on fire. Bodies littered the fields in the outskirts.
“The pilots looked for survivors. There were none.”
“None?” Micah asked in shock. “Not even the children?” Then he remembered Captain Serrado’s description of the Voloth strategy: to kill as many natives as they felt necessary and enslave the rest. He looked back at the scene with renewed horror. This was what the alien captain had saved them from—this, times a factor of hundreds.
“There won’t be any survivors,” Tal said, meeting his eyes. The rage in hers made them glow. “Not of any age. Colonel, why was I not notified of this earlier?”
“You were, Lancer Tal. I alerted the ADF as soon as the transport wreckage was found.”
“Then why—” She stopped, closing her eyes for a moment before pulling out her reader card and activating it. With a single shake of her head, she slid the card across for Micah to see.
There it was, the first item on her planetary security update, which Tal hadn’t had time to read because she’d been in one political meeting after another all day. Clearly a revamping of protocols was in order, and for a moment he almost felt sorry for Aldirk. But only for a moment.
“My apologies,” Tal said. “And your decision with the Code Black was absolutely correct. Did your pilots locate what did this?”
“Yes. Approximately ten lengths downriver, they found this.”
The scene changed again, and he heard Tal’s intake of breath. His own breathing had ceased entirely as he stared at something straight out of a horror vid.
Judging by the trees it was stomping past on its way downstream, the thing was nearly the size of the state transport. It moved on four thick, jointed legs, which navigated the uneven river bottom so smoothly that its huge block-shaped top barely shifted off level. It was a nightmare of tubes and wiring, with no regard for aesthetics. This was a machine designed purely for utility, and its only job was destruction.
“And they call it a pacifier.” The contempt dripped off Tal’s voice.
Colonel Debrett came back onscreen. “You recognize this?”
“Yes, Captain Serrado described it quite well. The Voloth call it a pacifier, but the Gaians call it a ground pounder. I prefer the Gaian name.” She tapped her earcuff. “Gehrain. Yes, bring them both immediately.”
“Are your pilots still monitoring it?” Micah asked.
“Unfortunately, they cannot. Based on their reports and the video, I authorized an attack by rescue pilot Modro. It did not go well.”
“Show us,” Tal said.
Debrett nodded, and a moment later the screen split, showing footage from both the rescue and cargo transports. Micah focused on the cargo pilot’s footage, which remained steady as it recorded the rescue pilot’s high-speed maneuvers on approach. Modro was taking no chances, making himself into a difficult target long before it could be expected that the ground pounder would be able to respond.
But it apparently had eyes on all four sides of that blocky top and was firing some sort of projectile weapon almost before Modro cleared the tree tops. He rolled his transport and fired back, his disruptors lighting up the shadowy riverbed.
To Micah’s dismay, that was all they did. Upon hitting the ground pounder, they shimmered along the surface of some sort of translucent bubble, which glowed brightly before fading back to invisibility. The ground pounder’s only response was to stop firing its weapon; otherwise it seemed entirely unaffected. The pause gave Modro time to pull up, but his reprieve was short-lived as a stream of projectiles followed his path. Somehow he managed to get out of range, only to loop around and come back for a second run.
“Let’s see if this shekker can shrug off a missile,” he said into his com, and lined up for the shot. The ground pounder had also changed its weapon choice, opting for a pulsed laser that exploded trees right and left as they missed their target. Modro fired, and Micah held his breath as he watched the smoke trail streak toward the ground pounder. At the same moment, one of the laser pulses sliced off the tip of the transport’s wing.
“I’m hit!”
He needed four eyes to watch everything at once, but the explosion of the missile drew his attention first. It had been a direct hit, and he waited for the smoke and flame to clear.
“Spawn of a fantenshekken!” His fist smacked the table when the ground pounder stepped out of the smoke cloud, apparently unharmed. “Did it even make a dent?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Tal said.
They watched it fire a blizzard of weaponry after the retreating transport, landing two more hits that turned a limping retreat into a spiraling crash. As soon as Modro’s transport vanished, the machine turned its attention to the cargo transport.
“Get out of there,” Tal whispered, and Micah breathed a sigh of relief as the cargo pilot’s cams showed a rapid change of direction. It was streaking toward the rescue transport’s crash site when the rear cam recorded some type of missile approaching.
“I’ve got fire on my tail,” said a woman’s voice. “Evading.” The cameras rolled through a dizzying series of maneuvers, and the missile vanished from the rear cam.
“This thing is following us.” The pilot’s voice was less calm as she pushed her transport into a vertical climb. “Shek! I can’t lose it; it’s coming around for another go. It must be targeting my heat signature. Sutter, unlock missile one.”
“Missile one ready,” said a male voice.
“Let’s see if we can divert it. Ready…fire.”
“Missile away.”
The transport’s forward cam showed a smoke trail arcing into the distance.
“Dammit, take the bait, you piece of dokshin, take it, take it…no!”
The screen went white, then black.
Colonel Debrett appeared a moment later. “Guard Paraska managed to blow her cabin release just before impact, and landed with herself and her crew unharmed. The cargo transport is a total loss. As of right now she and her crew are still making their way cross-country to the crash site of the rescue transport, but Guard Modro is not responding to calls. We’re hoping that he’s merely unconscious.”
“As are we,” Tal said. “Do we at least have it on orbital scan?”
“Yes, we do. It’s still in the riverbed and still moving southwest. I’ve been informed that at its current rate of speed, it will hit the next village in just over two hanticks. I sent a squadron as backup when we realized what had happened to WSC813, but based on that battle footage, I redirected them to aid the downed pilots and crew. Engaging the ground pounder will require a great deal more firepower. I’ve already armed and launched my entire fleet, but it will take them another hantick and forty to arrive, and there are holdings and homes all along the river.”
“Have you issued an evacuation order?”
He hesitated. “Not yet. I wasn’t certain how much information you would want to give out at this time.”
&nb
sp; Micah understood his reticence, given the fact that not five hanticks ago Tal had made a planetary announcement that the Voloth were not a threat.
Well, they were now.
Chapter 21
Combining forces
“What do you suppose happened?” Lhyn asked as the door closed behind the Lancer. “She looked like she was just stung by a desert wasp.”
“She’s the leader of an entire planet.” Ekatya turned off the translator. “Shippers only know how many emergencies she’s juggling at any given moment.”
“Hard to believe there could be an emergency more important than a bunch of aliens dropping out of the sky.”
Ekatya’s mind was already back to the Lancer’s most startling statement. “I can’t believe she’s giving me back my ship. It’s a treasure trove of technology, and right now I have no way to defend it. She could just walk aboard and take it.”
Lhyn shook her head. “That woman plays the long game. She’s not interested in short-term gain. She wants to pull Alsea out of the mud, and she knows she’ll get there faster if she does it with our cooperation.” She offered a knowing grin. “Still think she’s not acting in the best interests of her world?”
“I’m not sure what to think about her anymore. I keep looking for the real motivation behind all that compassion and forward thinking. It’s not very…political.”
“She said it herself: she’s not really a politician. Maybe their caste system has something to do with the way she views her office. Her predecessor was a scholar and apparently he was everything you’d expect in a politician, but if her goal is the pursuit of honor, then that would affect how she sees her title.”
“Oh, then scholars aren’t honorable?” Ekatya asked innocently.
“Very funny. You can’t generalize it to entire castes. But the ideals of each caste are different, and if she’s really striving for the warrior ideal, then she’s not going to be a typical politician.” Lhyn settled back in her chair. “Speaking of leaders, what was all that about leaders and who was alone today?”
Ekatya wasn’t quite sure how to explain it. Lhyn might be the head of her anthropology group, but that wasn’t the same thing as being a Fleet captain.
“Remember this morning, when we were coming in on the Lancer’s transport, and I accused her of messing with my mind?” she asked.
“You mean when you were practically smoking out the ears, and I was envisioning an abrupt end to a lovely friendship?”
“Yes, well…” She was embarrassed now, remembering how angry she’d been. “In my defense, I’d had an extremely long day, lost my ship, and was hopped up on alien drugs. And I’m not comfortable with the idea of someone rooting around inside my head.”
“I don’t think she roots around. She said that interfering with your emotions would break their highest law. Think about that. It means that the Alseans consider violation of emotional privacy to be more egregious than murder. They value the mind more than the body.”
Ekatya hadn’t considered it that way, but now that Lhyn pointed it out, it seemed obvious. “Oh, stars,” she said as the realization hit. “That means I accused her of worse than murder.”
“Yes, and she took it rather well, didn’t she?”
Ekatya rubbed her face. “I owe her one Hades of an apology.”
“You sure do,” Lhyn agreed cheerfully. “But you still haven’t explained the alone thing.”
It took Ekatya a moment to set aside her horror at having made such a gargantuan, and utterly rookie, diplomatic mistake. But Lhyn’s curiosity was up now, so she tried.
“She said that what I felt last night was her sharing her own emotions with me. So I started thinking about that—about which of my feelings were hers and which were mine. And they weren’t any different. I can’t tell them apart. What she was trying to do was show me, without a common language and at the most basic level of emotion, that she understood what I was going through. She knows what it’s like to be alone with the consequences of your decisions.”
“But you’re not alone.”
“When I’m on a mission, I am. There’s only one captain on a ship. And last night I was more alone than I’d ever been. It wasn’t just you, it was the ship and my crew and not knowing anything, not being able to ask, being helpless—I was just this side of going out of my mind. I kept wondering how high a price I’d have to pay for doing the right thing and whether this time it really would be too high. Lancer Tal knew all of that. In the middle of everything, she took the time to make me feel less alone, and the only reason she was able to do that is because she feels alone. There’s only one Lancer.”
“Oh.” Lhyn’s eyes widened. “I get it now. So all that mysterious talk was you telling her that she’s not alone. Because you understand her position.”
“Right. Which is probably presumptuous of me, since I’m commanding a ship and she’s commanding an entire world, but…a ship really is a tiny little self-contained world. And she heard me.”
“I think she did. You two were looking at each other like you were speaking your own language.”
Ekatya nodded. “Maybe we were.”
“Well then!” Lhyn beamed at her. “You being besties with the Lancer of Alsea can only be to my advantage. I’m looking forward to all of the highly placed people I’ll get to talk to because Lancer Tal wants to keep your girlfriend happy.”
“She wants to keep you happy because she wants to pick through that big brain of yours. It has nothing to do with me. So tell me, what are you going to ask the Lead Templar when you meet her?”
“Oh my stars, I have a list,” Lhyn said, and launched into a monologue that warmed Ekatya with its sheer familiarity. Was it only sixteen hours ago that she thought she’d never see Lhyn again? Yet here she was, relatively unhurt and unaffected by all that had happened. Nothing could squelch this woman for long, not even surviving the sort of crash landing that would go in the record books.
In that moment, as she sat in her alien hospital bed, Ekatya was deeply grateful that Lhyn had defied orders and refused to evacuate. It was difficult to imagine being here, working through this unplanned first contact, without her companionship and expertise. Not to mention that if Lhyn had evacuated, she would have been insanely jealous that Ekatya was interacting with Alseans and she wasn’t. Ekatya smiled at the thought.
“I get the feeling you’re not listening,” Lhyn said.
“Of course I—”
A tap on the door interrupted them. “Come in,” Ekatya said.
Nothing happened, and she muttered a curse as she flipped the translator back on. Lhyn chuckled before calling out in Alsean, resulting in a tall and very fit Guard entering the room. Ekatya recognized him from the group that had surrounded the Lancer, and now that she was looking more closely, she could see that the sleeves of his dark blue jacket bore three red chevrons. Obviously someone of rank.
He stopped and briefly bowed his head, then spoke in a deep voice. The feminine tones that issued from the translator a moment later made Ekatya’s head spin, and she vowed to get this language issue fixed just as soon as they made it back to their ship.
“Captain Serrado, well met. I’m Lead Guard Gehrain, sent by Lancer Tal. She asks that you and Commander Baldassar join her as soon as possible.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned toward the door and made a motion, stepping aside as a healer pushed a mobile chair into the room.
“Looks like you’re going on a trip,” Lhyn said.
“If I may, Captain?” The healer held out his hands, and Ekatya realized with considerable alarm that he meant to pick her up and put her in the chair. She looked for a reason to refuse, but the bed was higher than the chair, and any attempt to get in that thing by herself was almost certain to end in disaster. Stifling a sigh, she nodded and tried not to react as the healer slid his hands around her back and under her legs. With surprising strength and gentleness, he deposited her in the chair, arranged her cased leg, and pushed her toward the do
or.
“Wait!” Lhyn picked up the translator and put it on Ekatya’s lap. “Since I’m apparently not invited.”
Ekatya barely had time to say thank you before Gehrain whisked her away. At the second corridor intersection, she found Commander Baldassar walking toward them with another Guard at his side.
“Captain! You look quite a bit better than when I last saw you,” he said as he fell into step with them.
“Thank you; I feel better as well. The shower was at least half of it.”
He smiled. “Don’t I know it. Any idea what this is about?”
“None. I just got a notification and an escort, same as you. All I know is that Lancer Tal is the one who summoned us.” Only now did it occur to her that she didn’t even know where they were going. Was the Lancer having them flown to the State House?
Before she could ask, they were stopping in front of a nondescript door. Gehrain gestured for Baldassar to take over her chair, then tapped on the door and opened it. “Lancer Tal, the captain and commander are here.”
“Thank you, bring them in.”
Ekatya looked around with interest as Baldassar wheeled her through the door. It was clearly some sort of conference room, with a large viewscreen at one end. An older Alsean in uniform watched them from the screen, while Colonel Micah and Lancer Tal sat together at the table. The Lancer’s cordial warmth had vanished and she was all business now, wasting no time on formalities and speaking in clipped tones as she ordered the colonel onscreen to reset some sort of video. Then she held up a finger, forestalling any questions from Ekatya as she tapped first her wristcom and then her earcuff. “Aldirk, I need you to drop everything and issue an immediate evacuation order for—” She stopped and addressed the screen. “Colonel, the coordinates?”
The older warrior rattled off a string of code, which the Lancer repeated. “Do you have it? Good. This is an order straight from my office. Coordinate with the local militia, call in anyone you need, just get it done. Tell everyone within sight of the river to get out of sight of it. It doesn’t matter where they go, as long as they move away from the river.” She paused, then met Ekatya’s eyes and said, “More trouble than I needed today, that’s how much. Of the five hundred ground pounders on that orbital invader, it turns out the Gaians destroyed four hundred and ninety-nine.”