Neodymium Betrayal, page 9
So when Frank Zej offered her a paid vacation, she took it. The day Zej returned from his failed offensive on Fort Jehu, instead of keeping his legal appointments he spent hours getting to know the pudgy land-walrus. Holding her giant paw, listening to her jokes, complimenting her enormous tusks … she had no reason to believe the handsome, authoritative human hadn’t actually spoken to her aloof supervisor about a paid vacation, and he helped her on a sky-bus bound for the city that same day.
It wasn’t ideal, but hopefully by the time the real Wandla figured anything out and came back, Lem would be someone else, and in the meantime, she had the Bichank’s phone number, so she could call and ask her to stay away longer if needed. Lem didn’t mind doing a sanitation worker’s job for free—she still had Zej’s entire life savings in her bra.
Precious little good any of that did her, stuck outside this meeting room, though, while the Growen leaders conferred inside about the fate of Fort Jehu. Lem paced as two giant trash-bots followed her back and forth like pets. The cool metallic floor tickled her bare toes as her feet plop-plop-plodded like land-walrus paws. Her heart pounded. She didn’t dare think of the reason she needed to get into that room.
“No, I just wish I was at Fort Jehu because I’m so dang loyal to the Growen, and I hate missing the action,” Lem muttered to herself, erasing the word “family” from her consciousness. “Just like I’m disappointed I dropped my helmet and we didn’t wipe everyone out.”
Gah, she hated these fake thoughts right now, she hated them! How could she get into the filking room? The polymerwall had a small, round window in it. Lem had been careful not to pace in front of it, but a quick peep …
Inside, Growen top brass all sat around a smooth, obsidian table. Diebol was angled and pushed back from the table—yup, that was Diebol, Lem smiled: he left plenty of strategic space in case he needed to fight everyone in the room. These armchair bureaucrats had built the Growen forces together, but everyone knew Diebol despised most of them.
Well, Lem would just have to do him the favor of replacing one.
General Johnson was facing the window. He looked up for a second—Lem waved at him, and then ducked away. No matter how big Johnson’s ego, a rude land-walrus wave would not justify a mention to peers in an emergency meeting. If it was rude enough, though, it might justify a quick “excuse me while I literally hit the latrine.” Right? The kind of guy who shoved people and dropped anti-Bichank slurs even in front of known Bichank sympathizer Stygge Diebol—that kind of speciesist would want to come out here and punch her real quick for daring to disrespect him, right?
Lem checked again to see Johnson glaring at the window. She stuck out her tongue and bent down her paw to mimic a human hand in rude, three-fingered salute.
He looked away from her in disgust, but did nothing.
Yeah, you didn’t get rank without learning how to take down names and have someone else do the punishing for you. Come on, she couldn’t wait for this …
Lem looked behind herself at the empty hallway, hunting for the exact location of the surveillance cam. She couldn’t see one … ah, there was one flat, oval imprint of a camera directly above the conference room entrance. If she should get really close to the polymerwall, it wouldn’t see her face.
You know … A terrifying doppelgänger was worth slipping out of an emergency meeting, and insane enough that he wouldn’t tell anyone.
Lem stood by the window, staring at Johnson, and when he was looking up, she lifted the edge of the Wandla sticker behind her ear, defaulting to the newly gathered DNA on the other sticker: the general’s own genetic code. For just a second, the general saw his own face on the land-walrus head, before the land-walrus smirked at him, and disappeared.
At least, Lem hoped. She held her breath …
Oh yes. The polymerwall squished as it started to activate, and Lem scurried away from it toward the supply closet. As the general stomped out of the meeting room through the wall, his wrinkled jaw clenched in seething insult, Lem threw him another rude salute and jumped into the closet.
The general dove after her. “I’ll skin you, Bichank witch—” was cut off by a stun cartridge from Frank Zej’s still very useful gun.
Lem breathed and wiped her brow as the Growen general crumbled at her feet. In the second it took him to fall butt over boots she regretted using a stun cartridge.
Because now she had a living person, completely helpless at her feet, and no way to hide him. Should she kill him? She didn’t know much about the next guy in line for his job—was he worse? And what if she needed this guy to come back to life later so she could switch identities?
“You’re overthinking this,” she muttered. She needed a general. She needed to get in there right now. Why would it ever be a bad thing for one of these guys to be dead?
It felt different when he was totally helpless. Just like someone’s really stupid, clumsy dad on his face.
“Njande, I really wanted to do this awesome Paradox thing where we are so powerful our enemies don’t want to fight us anymore, but I am not there right now,” she whispered.
It didn’t take long to rip out the insides of a cleaning robot to stash the body.
Chapter Thirteen
Jei
I waved Hulk and Professor Wordsworth down in the tall grass behind me. We were on our way to destroy the router in the comms tower so our wristbands would default to the universal data network instead—then, maybe, everyone could call for help.
My eyes shot around to every shadow; here, on the slight hill in the center of the base that supported the communications tower, the trees and shrubbery thickened. That didn’t just mean cover for us.
Below, behind us in the starlight, tanks rolled over rubble as some of their crews ran in and out of barracks trying to rescue people—and in other cases, just straight blew stuff up. Scattered evac vehicles posted at the perimeter, trying to escape the bubble wall that was now a prison. I couldn’t shake the sound of the little kids screaming.
Reise swiveled at a moving shadow. “Identify yourself,” Gideon hissed.
The shadow fired. Reise fired back; someone cursed, and gurgled. I waved Reise to stay hidden in position, and Gideon and I dashed to our attacker’s position.
A pink-haired pale man in prison uniform lay dead there, a wound through his chest smoking as blood seeped from a ruptured aorta. Gideon threw up a thumbs-up for Reise to see.
I took the man’s stolen flayer gun, barely noting the nametag Frank Zej on his chest. Shyte, the prison had opened somehow. Were they responsible for this whole mess? Had they somehow taken control of central computing? How did they possibly know the access codes?
Another flayer shot almost took off Gideon’s upheld hand, this time from closer to the communication tower. Gideon dove down under the bush by me and returned fire; I swiveled to block the laser knife plunging down toward my back.
Correction, the laser knives. A ten-tentacled prisoner jumped back as I parried his first blow with the staff of my mace and with the second blow made his number of limbs more equal to mine. With the third blow he didn’t have a head anymore.
“Sorry,” I said, not really sorry at all but still trying out this whole Paradox Warrior “respect for all life.” The body crumbled to the ground like floppy seafood, environmental suit hissing and sputtering water.
I ducked down beside the prisoner, searching for a communicator, my head on swivel watching Gideon’s back and checking Reise’s location—
Someone was moving behind Reise’s bush. I aimed Frank Zej’s pistol, breathed, and squeezed. With a cry a shadow fell to the ground.
I signed in Frelsi visual code for Reise to move toward the tower. He shot back a thumbs-up. “Cover Reise,” I told Gideon, still watching his back as a couple more prisoners tried to take the hill toward us. Aim, breathe, fire. Aim, breathe fire … both prisoners ate oxidized cartridge and tumbled down the hill.
The grass by the nearest tower leg rustled in the night breeze. I couldn’t see Reise moving—but that meant neither could anyone else. Lem or I would’ve done a quick dash, but it was probably best for Reise to follow protocol and take things low and slow in the tall grass.
I saw him when he reached the tower.
“Stay down!” I yelled. He lay flat. The crisscross metal leg wasn’t good cover, and someone would have to climb, exposing themselves more: I chose myself for that. “Cover me,” I told Gideon with a pat on his shoulder blade.
“Roger,” he said. I ran to the metal spindle, trying to see if I could draw fire with my glowing staff—
But the hill was quiet now; all the screaming and shooting was far away. I waved Reise to stay down here at the foot of the tower, and motioned with my head for him to watch Gideon’s location; the scrawny kid nodded back at me, moonlight glinting off his glasses by my boot. From here they could cover each other and my climb, with enough distance between them to stay hidden and report back to Cinta if something else went wrong.
I tugged at the rope ladder that dangled against the tower leg. Seemed solid—with one more glance around I started my climb. I just needed to smash this tower’s wireless router with my mace so our wristbands would fall back onto satellite data, and then our leadership could get orders out to us. And our communication tower didn’t use polymerwall protection. I’d heard plans for the past year to upgrade it, but our leaders had focused on safeguarding the kids’ barracks and fortifying the perimeter instead. So when I reached the top of the ladder I just had to push open the cold, dew-misted trap door above me—
Shyte. I’d forgotten about the sentry bot. It fired the instant the hatch opened; I felt the steel door reverberate against my arm as bolt after bolt thudded and twanged against it. I didn’t have a good angle to get out around the door without getting shot: I couldn’t spin my staff into a forcefield in the tiny, body-sized doorway.
“Grenade, please!” I yelled down.
Reise tossed it as high as he could, and a very weak em-pull on my part made sure it ended up in my hand.
Just the slightest em-pull effort made my head implode with agony again, like giant knives stabbed in all directions into my skull. I clenched my teeth, clicked the count-down on the grenade through blinding, pulsing white pain, and tossed the egg into the tower. As the explosion rocked the tower, I held the hatch shut above me, cringing into its vibrating heat.
And with a soft hum, my wristband shone green with new messages.
Lem
Seated now at the onyx table in the Growen meeting room, Lem folded her hands in front of her with the poise of a general.
But adrenaline pulsed through her temples. Sweat stung her palms; she could barely hear over the unbearable galloping in her chest as Diebol talked through the video embedded in the middle of the table.
The video where Fort Jehu’s machines were slaughtering its inhabitants.
Lem didn’t bother fighting the intense emotion. How could she? Best to reframe it in her thoughts as excitement. She was excited. Excited. She was General Johnson, speciesist against Bichanks, and she loved this.
You hate this lie, you’re terrified—
She. Loved. This.
“I don’t understand,” said a shy-voiced human with curly white hair and wide green eyes. General Cabalero, read his uniform. He tapped on the video on the center of the table, switching it from grainy feeds of carnage to a full real-time strategy map of Fort Jehu. Assets under Growen control shone blue—and the entire page was a wave of giant blue squares and circles eating little red Frelsi dots like candy. “This is amazing, but how is she doing this? Is she a computer program?”
Diebol smirked. “What She is, is a Stygge matter, for Bricandor and myself alone. What you need to know is that we’re cooking the Frelsi like mollusks in their own shell. And I need you to strategize logistics and reconnaissance. For tonight, we need to clean up stragglers and bolster supportive forces around Fort Jehu, and then we need to find access ports for Her on other bases.”
“Why couldn’t we do this during the siege?” interrupted a gruff, deeply critical voice, from the general with the large purple-black beard. “Seems like someone’s been holding out on us, gentlemen.” Lem couldn’t see his nameplate from here, but this general clearly didn’t like Diebol: the purple beard seemed to flare like a wolf’s scruff as the man leaned forward to shoot eye-daggers at the young Stygge across the table. “It almost seems like you cost us billions of drachma in resources for no reason.”
Diebol scowled and crossed his arms. “Take it up with Bricandor,” he said. “She wasn’t ready until Bereens destroyed the transport camp; we needed the right Frelsi computer system.”
Jei? What did Jei do?
“So you’re not really in charge of Her.” Purple-beard smiled. “As usual, you’re just the messenger.”
“So shoot me,” Diebol growled, leaning forward like he really, really wanted the other man to try.
It would have been interesting, but Lem’s eye strayed to a crescent-moon shape chasing ten red dots on the table, her vision tunneling as it grew closer, closer …
“You couldn’t find a Frelsi computer?” Purple-beard jeered as the half-moon ate someone—maybe someone Lem knew. “Aren’t you the one who cares so much about the working conditions of our men? But you let Bricandor hold out on us, and we lost thousands this week on Luna-Guetala alone!”
Diebol spat some retort about research that Lem didn’t hear as the half-moon rolled over two more little red dots.
She couldn’t take it.
“Gentlemen!” General Johnson thudded his fist down on the table. Lem didn’t know if this was how he normally behaved, but this was how he was going to behave today. “Are we here to talk solutions with this brilliant weapon, or did you get me out of bed to watch you two compare laser-staffs?” She threw in a huff and a dramatic hand-wave.
Everyone stared at her for a second. Yeah, she sounded weird. But the half-moon had eaten five little red blips now, and she had to make it stop. Think, think: “Have we completely shut down their evac platforms?” she asked.
“Yes,” Diebol pursed his forehead and blinked, as if very pleasantly surprised by Johnson’s reaction. He traced the perimeter of the base with his finger on the screen. “They can’t get out.”
“Wait,” White-haired Cabalero sounded panicky every time he opened his mouth. “Wait, why did those just turn green?”
Everyone leaned over. The red dots were flashing emerald in waves across the screen.
“Because they got communication back up!” Purple-beard snarled. “They can call for help from other bases now!”
“It means nothing,” Diebol shot back. “All the help in the universe means nothing if they’re dead before it gets there.”
“What do you mean, nothing, comms is everything! Comms is what cost us the siege!” Purple-beard sprayed angry spittle across the table.
Lem massaged her temples, trying to shut out the argument. Focus. You’re here for Her. Focus! Sure, the dots were green now, they had comms up. But the crescent moon had eaten all the little dots in front of it, and now it started down the street toward … shyte, the boys lived there, and Juju lived over there …
“How are we getting Her into the next base?” Lem asked. “If She attacks the nearest base at the same time, there won’t be ‘help’ for Fort Jehu at all, right?”
Diebol made that face again, the surprised, almost appreciative face, but shook his head. “At this time She can only take out one fort at once.”
“Can’t She just lower intensity or whatever?” Purple-beard argued just to argue. “Half-strength on two bases, instead of full strength on one?”
“You sound stupid right now,” Lem muttered with the Growen part of her brain: a flying anaconda succeeds by targeting one guinea pig, not chasing two at a time. But Lem’s almost subconscious whisper of a soul latched onto the idea; dividing Her attention might save some little now-green blips. “What does She need to get into a second base?” Johnson asked.
“We need an access port. Any access port. Any stolen computer, any kidnapped Frelsi soldier who remembers their login from the system you’re targeting,” Diebol said. “That’s how powerful She is.”
Shyte! Lem almost choked, and turned the choke into a violent cough. Three blue squares devoured another huge handful of little Frelsi greens.
“Are you alright, Johnson?” another general leaned over and whispered while the others kept talking. “That cough is getting nasty.”
Lem waved him off, trying to sort out the assets on the field. If no one could get out, could something match Her strength? “What happened with the Bereens kid, again?” she asked. “I must have zoned out—”
Purple-beard practically roared in frustration. “Pay attention, Johnson! That was the first thing we discussed! Crazy Stygge-kid blew up an entire transport camp on his own but for some reason didn’t kill anyone. Millions of drachma in damage!”
“Money is what’s most important, isn’t it,” Diebol sneered.
“No, we can fund a war with heart and magic, Diebol,” Purple-beard snapped.
Dang, Jei. A whole camp on your own? Lem pursed her lips and nodded, deeply impressed and not hiding it. A Growen general could be impressed with raw power, why not? A pang shot through her chest: she would’ve liked to see that.
And Jei was a master at strategy. He should be here, not her. He should be doing this weird sneaky-around stuff, lying to himself—
I’m not lying to myself. I am a loyal Growen dangit how do we make this stop?! The green blips were drowning in a blue ocean, fading to black in clusters as She ate her way across the map. Lem hadn’t been this flustered since the interrogation center. Agh, like that stupid triangle-map game they’d forced her to play against Jei then … that pure, distilled strategy she sucked at. When Jei and Diebol played, they would often give up smaller pieces to each other to trick each other into losing large swaths of territory.
