Alone

  Halfway up the Observatory, long black antimissile barrels slide out of hidden slots.

  Our mountain of stone becomes a giant monster swatting at the gnats buzzing through the sky. The air fills with crisscrossing streaks of missile smoke, white tower cannon beams and the ragged red flashes of the antimissile batteries.

  Fighters explode, one after another.

  South of my building, a fat troopship angles toward a wide street. One second it is flying smoothly, descending to unload whatever it carries, the next a stream of red fire reaches out from the Observatory’s southwest corner. The troopship erupts into a thousand flaming pieces, a deadly hail of bouncing metal that scatters in all directions.

  When this battle began, only fifteen of the Observatory’s antimissile rounds remained. I knew waiting to use those might cost us tower cannons, but we had to make sure the enemy ships were so close they couldn’t be missed, we had to make every antimissile round count. That strategy resulted in the deaths of at least four of my people—in a way, I sacrificed them to lure the enemy in.

  I am a killer. That is who I am.

  That choice may haunt my dreams later, but for now it seems to have worked. The surviving fighters point their noses straight up and accelerate on columns of flame; they must be heading back to the Dragon. I count only ten of them—we destroyed the rest.

  Victor thumps me on the back. “Em, it worked! The skies are clear!”

  Springer horns sound from the southeast. Three long notes, then two short, then two long—the alert signal for ground fighting.

  At least one troopship landed.

  We’ve knocked their ships out of the sky, but the battle isn’t over.

  Now the fight moves to the streets.

  Bawden guides our spider through the streets. Victor grips the cannon controls. My bracelet hums with the promise of death.

  This won’t be like the battle with the Belligerents. They were dangerous enough with their muskets and bayonets, but this time our enemy came from the stars.

  What weapons will we face?

  My squad’s other two spiders crawl along behind us, our circle-star infantry behind them.

  Up ahead, rifle and musket fire echoes through the streets, off tall stone buildings darkened by fire and dusted with ash. I hear the crackling sizzle of bracelet beams, the whuff of spider cannons, shouts of rage…and screams.

  Screams of wounded humans and Springers. A third kind as well. This kind chitters. It clicks. It hums.

  The screams of our enemy.

  And, above it all, far off in the distance, the low rumbling of rockets. I look up, search, but the skies above Uchmal remain clear.

  The sound of battle grows louder. We’re closing in. I can smell it, too, the stench of gunpowder and burning machines.

  Bawden turns a corner.

  The street is partially blocked by the wreck of a sleek fighter craft. Thick black smoke billows from its shattered shell. Part of the fighter remains stuck in a building three stories up, smoldering with unseen fire.

  Next to the wreck lie two dead bodies—one human, one Springer, both with horrific, gaping wounds of mangled flesh and splintered bone. They died so recently that their blood still spreads, red swirling with blue, both mixing with the street’s ash, dirt and gravel. I don’t recognize the Springer. The human is facedown, thankfully—one less name I have to know right now.

  Bawden drives past the wreck and the bodies, stops the spider at the next intersection, just close enough for me to look around the corner.

  Two blocks down the street, a troopship. Where our shuttle is streamlined, silver and sleek, the alien ship is thick, segmented and spiny. Its dark gray color eats up the morning sun. Unknown symbols on its hull gleam in rich shades of violet.

  Like maggots spilling forth from a rotten fruit, enemy soldiers scurry around the troopship, looking for cover against blistering rifle, musket and bracelet fire that pours down from buildings on either side of the street. The enemy soldiers move fast. I can’t quite make out what they look like, because their colors shift and swirl, matching those of the street or building or ship or wreckage around them.

  The aliens return fire. Their bulky black rifles stutter with orange muzzle flashes, bullets ripping fist-sized chunks from the stone walls around the windows.

  I see something moving on top of the troopship—an armored turret with a stubby barrel. It reminds me of our tower cannons. The barrel lets loose a gout of flame and a deafening boom; down the street, a third-floor balcony erupts in a blossom of fire and stone, and I know that more of my people are dead.

  The enemy ship…it looks undamaged. If it landed, can it take off again? Can it fly?

  I grab Victor.

  “When we charge, don’t hit the ship. We’re going to capture it. See if you can take out its cannon up on top.”

  I lean out over the armored ridge and shout back to the rest of our squad. The other two spiders are close behind, the circle-stars crouched around their legs.

  “We’re going in! Spiders, protect our flanks, and do not target the enemy landing craft. Circle-stars, follow us in. The enemy has camouflage armor that lets them hide easily. That will make them hard to find if they escape, so make sure none of them do!”

  I slide back into the spider’s protected cockpit, knowing that some of my circle-stars are going to die today.

  Attack, attack, when in doubt, always attack.

  I draw a deep breath, feel my lungs expand. I take a fraction of a second to center myself. These could be my last moments of life. If I die, I want to die a good death.

  It’s time.

  My held breath erupts as a roaring battle cry.

  “Bawden, chaaaaaaarge!”

  I duck low and hold on tight as our war machine turns the corner and hurtles toward the enemy. Bullets hammer against the metal spider, ping-ping-ping, so many hitting so fast it sounds like a musical instrument. Behind us, my circle-stars fire rifles and bracelets between our spiders’ legs.

  My heart kicks so hard each beat makes my vision twitch. My mouth tastes like sand. It will only take seconds to reach the enemy, yet each instant drags out for eternity.

  I don’t want to get shot, I don’t want to die….

  Victor fires the cannon—the troopship’s turret explodes in a thousand pieces.

  A roaring boom: our spider tilts hard left. I slam into Bawden, but hang on. The spider levels out, each step a lurch that tosses me forward, then back, but we keep advancing.

  I rise up just enough to aim my bracelet.

  A frozen moment, a blur of images. An alien close ahead, armor shifting from tan to black to brown to ash-gray, the colors of the city. Limbs that are too long, joints too small. A dancer’s graceful fluidity. Spikes and curving protrusions—part of the armor, or part of the creature beneath? Black rifle firing, muzzle flashes lighting up the alien like an orange strobe light.

  I flick my fingers forward.

  My bracelet’s beam blinds me for an instant. By the time I can see again, the alien is no more. I’ve reduced that elegant creature to splatters of flesh, spinning bits of armor and a fading mist of yellow blood.

  The sounds of war and death: relentless, unforgiving. Rifles, muskets, bracelets, beam cannons, the rat-tat-tat-tat of alien weapons, explosions, roaring fire, screams of agony. I’m terrified beyond measure, waiting for a bit of metal to punch through me and end my short life.

  Victor fires the spider cannon again. The beam slices into the street, turning paving rocks into a blurring cloud of stone shrapnel, sending a pair of aliens spinning through the air.

  The armored aliens rush forward to meet our charge. They should be retreating into the buildings, finding places to hide and fight from cover. They have better weapons, yes, but we outnumber them and hold higher ground—their behavior makes no sense.

  Bullets ricochet off the spider’s armor.

  I fire again, killing another enemy soldier just as their charge meets ours.

>   Our spider’s front leg slashes down, long metal claw impaling an alien, punching through color-shifting armor as if it were paper. The alien’s click-hum-chitter scream of death is awful, a sound I know will never fully leave my ears.

  We’re through their charge and closing in on the troopship. Behind me I hear the battle cry of my young circle-stars as they meet the line of armored aliens. Rifles fire, knives slash, spears thrust. People die. The air splits with a numbing howl of war so horrific the God of Blood must be dancing to its tune.

  The landing craft’s rear end is open, a monster’s maw with a wide ramp serving as the tongue. At the top of the ramp, two aliens fire away at us.

  “Bawden, drive us inside!”

  The lurching spider pivots as she obeys.

  Victor unslings his rifle. He crouches low, his body mostly protected by the spider’s ridge. His legs bend with each lurching movement, keeping his head and chest impossibly level. He fires the rifle, flicks the black loop lever beneath it forward with a clack that reloads the weapon, fires again, his movements fast and sure.

  One of the aliens falls from the ramp.

  I mimic Victor’s stance. I hold my spear tight in my left hand, raise my right arm, aim at the alien and fire. My shot goes wide, hits somewhere inside the landing craft.

  Bawden’s lips curl back into a primitive snarl—our spider scurries up the ramp and into the fat bug-ship. Open sky gives way to gray ceiling.

  The last alien leaps into the cockpit, smashing into all of us and knocking me hard against the armored ridge. Victor grapples with it, the alien’s armor a swirling pattern of cockpit, black coveralls and Victor’s face.

  Bawden is between me and the alien. She draws her knife and thrusts—the blade skids off color-shifting armor. I drop my spear and lunge over her, grab the alien’s arm. It twists, trying to throw me off. Victor snatches his rifle up from the spider’s metal deck, jams the barrel under the creature’s chin—bangclackbangclackbang, three bullets rip through the helmet.

  The dead alien falls into Bawden, who stumbles into me and knocks me backward. I tumble over the spider’s armored ridge.

  The back of my head slams against metal.

  Everything swirls around me…I try to rise…I can’t…blackness drags me under.

  Odors engulf me: antiseptic, wet charcoal, scorched stone, blood, smoke, grease…burning flesh. This is what pain smells like, what death smells like.

  And damn, does my head hurt.

  I’m still in the landing craft, sitting on a crate of some kind. Kenzie Smith is stitching a gash on the back of my head.

  I was out for a while, apparently. By the time she woke me up, the battle was over.

  Bishop could be alive, dead, injured…I haven’t heard from his unit.

  The inside of this alien ship looks strange, but the design is obvious in concept: it was built to carry hundreds of tightly packed troops from one place to another, with little thought given to comfort. Everything is the same flat, dark gray as the outside.

  The spider is still in here. Seeing it crammed into this tight space, I’m even more impressed with Bawden’s driving skills. I wonder if the dead alien remains in the cockpit where Victor killed it.

  The spider hull bears hundreds of new dents, yellow and brown paint dotted with gleaming spots where bullets hit home. The leg closest to me is badly bent, metal torn apart on its top segment. I hope Borjigin can fix the damage quickly and get 05 back into service.

  “Finished,” Kenzie says. I feel a sting as she wipes at the newly stitched cut. She walks around in front of me. Her fingertips gently turn my head this way and that. Every motion feels like a sledgehammer thudding into my brain.

  “Your skull is thick,” she says. “Usually, that’s the cause of many problems, but in this case it helps.”

  She’s making a joke. That means I’m all right.

  Something flies over the spider’s armored ridge and clanks against the metal floor. The something rolls once, stops when it hits my foot. It’s the alien’s helmet, with three gore-smeared bullet holes in the top. No swirling colors now, it’s just a dull shade of gray.

  Kalle’s head peeks over the spider’s ridge.

  “Em, come up and see this!”

  I start to rise. Kenzie puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “You can go when I’m finished,” she says.

  I knock her hand away and stand. The sudden movement makes my throbbing head flush with new pain.

  “I’m good for now,” I say. “I’ll see you in the Observatory later.”

  Kenzie huffs.

  “You never listen to the people you need to listen to,” she says. “Thick skull indeed. I should have tended to the seriously wounded first, but here I thought I should take care of our leader before anyone else. Silly me.”

  With that, she picks up a big bag of medical supplies and trudges down the ramp, out of the ship.

  I watch her go with a sense of longing—I should have asked for a painkiller. My head hurts so bad I can barely think.

  “Em!” Kalle’s shout echoes off the troopship’s walls, makes me wince. “I said get up here!”

  I press my fingertips to my temples. I look up at the tiny tooth-girl. She smiles and vanishes behind the ridge.

  The fact that she’s here at all tells me we control the city. That’s good, but there’s still much to do. I need a casualty report. What’s our ammunition situation? Did we take any prisoners?

  I need to get out there and see what’s going on. But when I do, I’ll learn how many of my people died. I just can’t handle that yet. Seeing what Kalle has to show me will delay that news for a few moments.

  Slowly, I climb the spider’s rungs and slide over the ridge into the cockpit. The dead alien lies in a fingertip-thick pool of thick yellow fluid. Kalle is kneeling in the stuff; it’s all over her black coveralls, her hands, even her face.

  She grins up at me.

  “Isn’t this amazing?”

  The alien’s armor lies scattered about. Kalle removed all of it. The once-graceful creature is now nothing but a pile of dead flesh.

  Its skin looks stiff. Maybe shell is a better term than skin. I’ve never seen a color like this. Some of the jungle’s brighter flowers might come close to it. Matilda’s memories call up a name: fuchsia. The color is so bright and beautiful—it seems out of place on an unmoving corpse.

  Two arms, two legs and a head, but any similarity to humans ends there. The legs and arms have three sections, not two, and they’re thin; my arms are to this creature’s what Bishop’s are to mine. The alien’s joints seem so small they might break at the slightest movement.

  Narrow chest, a waist so tiny I could wrap my hands around it with forefingers and thumbs touching. Standing up, this creature must be a whole head taller than me, but I would outweigh it by quite a bit.

  The spikes I saw weren’t a part of the armor, they came through it. The spikes are long and delicate, like curved rose thorns that jut out of the alien’s arms and shoulders.

  Matilda’s memories fire. The narrow joints, the shiny shell, the long curves. There’s only one thing in her past that even remotely resembles this creature. That insect, stinging her—stinging me—when she was only four years old. The burning sensation…the fear.

  “It kind of looks like a Solomon wasp,” I say.

  Kalle stops her work, looks the corpse up and down.

  “A little bit,” she says. “Better nickname than jungle rat, I’ll give you that.”

  I don’t have the energy to yell at her.

  Compared to this willowy form, our human bodies are thick and brutish. Victor’s bullets mangled the top of the alien’s head, but I can still make out a face. At least I think it’s a face. Long and thin. A slate-blue ridge runs down the middle.

  I point down at two thick bumps halfway up the face, one on either side of the ridge.

  “Are those eyes?”

  Kalle nods. She uses her finger and thumb to pry one op
en. Beneath the lids is a corn-silk-yellow eye. Other than the color, the eye looks so much like a human’s that I lean away in an unconscious reaction of horror and surprise.

  I expect the eye to move, to focus, to see me.

  It won’t, of course—not unless these things can live with the tops of their heads blown apart.

  Kalle lets go. The lids slowly close.

  First the Springers, now this. Life—intelligent life—must come in many, many forms. What did the aliens on the Basilisk look like? We will never know.

  I leave Kalle to her gruesome work. I’m shaken to my core. That creature…so beautiful, yet it came here to kill us.

  I walk down the ramp. The stench of war hits me anew. Long curls of smoke drift in from some unseen fire. Dead wasp-aliens litter the ground. There are Springer bodies, too. And, of course, the fallen of my own people. A circle’s face stares out blankly. I recognize him—I. Tosto. Strange first name, what was it? Oh yes: Iseult.

  Iseult has a hole in his chest the size of my fist.

  My platoon’s other two spiders are heavily dented, but it looks like they didn’t take any serious damage.

  Our wounded—human and Springer both—are laid out all over the place. Kenzie and Pokano bark out orders to tend to this cut, that broken arm. Victor, Bawden and the other circle-stars jump to obey, to help their fellow soldiers.

  Tina Schuster scurries from person to person—dead and alive alike. She’s doing a head count. Soon she’ll give me that casualty report. Maybe my brain will stop throbbing by the time she does. I hope so, because when I see that report, my heart will hurt far more than my head ever could.

  Behind me, I hear the metal feet of a spider coming down the street. My three are accounted for, which means this one is from another platoon. I start to turn, but I freeze.

  The spider has to be from Bishop’s unit.

  What if he’s not in it?

  What if it’s someone come to tell me he’s gone?

  I’ve lost O’Malley…I can’t lose Bishop, too.

  The spider stops behind me.

  I force myself to look.

  Bishop stands alone in the cockpit, smiling at me.