CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jei
The jungle behind me swarmed with Frelsi soldiers now; they poured past the water tower under me in color-shifting camo, skittering and stomping through the underbrush and zipping by on shadowy air-riders, down the hill and into the streets of Retrack City.
I’d called them in without Lem’s confirmation because, well, we didn’t have much time to occupy the Growen barracks before the remaining blitzers there recovered enough to sort out the mass fainting of their comrades by the laundry pods. And Lem had closed the spaceport—even from here I could see clear quarantine bubbles now encasing the landing platforms, and my wristband showed an emergency override on all communication frequencies accessible from the tower. Incoming civilian ships circled a few times before diverting south to the next port town; military ships would have to land in the treacherous jungle, where we could fight without civilian casualties. Sure, there did seem to be a—hole—or something—in the spaceport stem? But Lem always came through, however she did it.
What had me worried was the lightning coming from the top of the port tower.
Bloodseas, I was dizzy. The grip on my gloves squicked on the wet metal of the water tower ladder as I leaned away from it, squinting—I couldn’t actually make out the control center windows across the city, but the lights there flickered on and off. I shook my pounding head with a hiss, focusing on each bootstep and each ladder rung on my way to the ground.
“Operations, I’m heading to the spaceport to recon ahead of your attack squad,” I spoke into my wristband. I’d found they tended to loosen my leash more when I stated my plan, instead of asking for permission.
“Negative, Alpha-Twelve, you’re—hoooly shyte in a sand-basket, what was that?” Sergeant Strong’s deep Hoernig-amphibian voice squeaked at the end of his sentence, and I took comfort in that.
Because I wasn’t the only one who suddenly remembered the destruction of Fort Jehu.
A power surge blasted from the spaceport. The entire block of buildings around it flickered, the glow of life through their polymerwalls struggling against the encroaching night for just a moment—before the streets went dark.
I don’t know what Sergeant Strong remembered, but I suddenly heard water that wasn’t there, hissing from a shower head that became a weapon when every computerized system in our lives turned against us under Sterba’s control. My skin remembered the scalding; children’s screams echoed in my mind under mechanical whirring and wild flayer fire.
That destruction in our memories? It had started with a black out.
“I think you want me down at the spaceport, Sergeant,” I said, and he didn’t argue as I swung myself onto a Frelsi air-rider and took off across the city.
LEM
Terror surged down Lem’s spine in bolts of what looked like lightning, and she had no idea why.
It’s all in my head. It’s all in my head. I’m having a bad reaction to the sleep drug that got spilled on my leg. I might even be asleep right now. It’s all in my head.
But she could now see her own energy field: not just sparks, definitely not the invisible electroencephalic signals an EEG machine might read, but an actual spreading wall of blue electricity blooming into an enormous orb that enveloped first her, then the nearest computers, now the control room with such brightness she couldn’t see outside it.
See? Not real. I know my abilities: static shock, static cling, and an innate field of charge that repulses metal shot at me. This—giant—dome-field—isn’t real.
A shadow appeared just outside the crackling wall of light—Lem’s heart raced, and something moist soaked her underarms—
A familiar figure parted the wall and stepped into the ring.
Whoa.
“I killed you before,” Lem said, shivering as if freezing. “Why would I be scared of you now? If you were here.”
“Because unlike fear, terror is biology. You can’t control your biology,” answered the figure. Lem recognized the words—the “voice,” if an energy being that invaded your thoughts could be said to have a “voice.” This was just the Accuser she’d picked up during her time with the Growen.
But the image didn’t match the voice. The form that stepped into the ring belonged to a patchwork human sewn together from thousands of pieces, long blond frizz jutting around her head like lightning. Her violent blue eyes glowed brighter than even the walls of light around them, with a piercing depth to their hue as if someone had punched two portals to another world through her skull.
“You’re looking better, Sterba,” Lem quipped. “Very … put together.” She couldn’t stop shaking. She heard her teeth chattering.
“The one person who actually understood you, you killed.” In three strides Sterba crossed the space between them; her hand shot out to Lem’s throat. Lem moved to block, and found her fingers moving through the air as if through thick honey, in slow motion. Claws dug into her jugular—
Long adult space-lemur claws. Reality blinked, and sped up; now Lem was on her knees, gripping her throat as burning crimson liquid trickled between her fingers. No more Sterba. A space-lemur flashed around her now, first kneeling in front of her, chuckling, then behind her, beside her. She didn’t recognize him.
But she did recognize him?
What a nonsense-burger question! It’s not real. I’m asleep. Have to remember to report this crazy nightmare reaction. The test studies didn’t have anything like this—
“Test studies? You’re so stupid. Don’t you see what’s going on?” the space-lemur laughed in the throaty consonant-filled Biouk tongue.
Lem squinted. Where did she know him from? Long, flowing black fur, with chestnut highlights, and the outline of a light brown triangle tracing his ebony forehead. Adult fangs jutted from his muzzle, down to his chest, and one of his giant, face-sized ears bore a sharp tear. Like a Cinta palette swap, but with scars, and muscles—bigger, and older. Alternate reality Cinta.
“I’m not Cinta, you idiot!” He laughed—that wonderful hissing, snarling Biouk chuckle, not like the loud, wide, vowel-filled laughs of humans. It was strange how sinister and good he sounded all at once. Like coming home finally, only to see it full of ghosts.
“Going through some serious effort to filk with my head, Accuser,” Lem grunted. It gurgled in her bleeding throat.
“Ha! I’m not even the Accuser!” He put her face between his leathery paws, squishing her cheeks like a baby. She reached up to grab him, but he was already on the other side of her electric field, like a blink, or a computerized glitch—a shadow silhouetted against the spreading wall of light.
Lem tilted her head, struggling to rise to her feet. Shyte, she was losing a lot of blood in this dream.
But the palette-swapped Cinta-guy wasn’t lying: it was true, he didn’t sound like any ba-eater she knew, and definitely not the Accuser. This dream had started with the Accuser’s voice, sure, but this voice? This voice was different. Her brain itched with the certainty that she knew it from somewhere, but she couldn’t place it in that face, behind those fangs.
“Okay, fine,” she gurgled, standing now. “Who are you?”
He leaned close; blood still dripped from his fangs. “I’m you,” he whispered.
That made sense. The voice, the swagger, the easy way he picked up her mace and spun it over his head—yeah, it seemed like her. The self she’d always wanted to be as a little girl while she watched the other space-lemurs play, or even later, when she felt alien among the other humans.
“The self locked inside,” he finished her thought.
“I don’t think I locked you anywhere,” she said. “I’ve tried to live like the person I wanted to be, I—shyte, why am I so terrified?” Her heart fluttered so fast she thought it might just explode, aching and flopping and flittering behind her sternum. She pounded her chest with one fist, trying to force herself to breathe. “What the hell?”
He laughed again, pouncing here and there on the tips of his toes as her field continued to spread. Now the control room, now the landing pads, now the city streets … the people in the quarantine bubbles screamed in this dream. She could see the city around them now, outside the tower, in the eerie light of her electric field, cut off from the jungle and the moonlight. Houses lost power, and the streets seemed barren of life.
“So you’re mad at me,” she said, palms on the windows.
“Mad doesn’t begin to cover it, Jaika,” he said.
JEI
I leaned into the evening wind as my air-rider whined through the narrow city streets, weaving past colorful blue, red, and green mud-brick slums, through sculpted gardens behind chic metallic spirals, and down the main dirt causeway toward the towering spaceport. All the culture and wealth of one of the most important cities on Luna Guetala seemed washed out, ghostly, in the blue light of the electrical dome spreading from the spaceport like a skirt woven of lightning. It buzzed, louder and louder as I drew nearer, and a scent like meat frying, or rubber burning, beat against my face in the breeze. A wave of darkness went ahead of it, heralded by flickering lights at the surf’s point; I could feel static in the air, and hear crackling under an eerily-muffled cacophony of distant, distant screams.
Other Frelsi air-riders scattered around me toward their disparate objectives, some rushing west to solidify our hold on the city, others on my course, overhead, with their own orders to secure the tower. I clocked the field as it spread—at this rate in about twenty minutes it would cross the threshold of the western district to engulf the city’s famous hospital, and in thirty it would have a third of the civilian population inside it. Okay, what was the voltage and the amperage here? I’d seen Lem fire targeted electric shocks that could sting, but I’d never seen her kill with them. So could I hope for a wall of stinging, stunning energy? The biggest threat seemed to be something like an EMP blast emanating in that wave of darkness ahead of the wall—definitely bad news if it reached hospital generators.
Was this Lem, or someone else?
It just looked like Lem, for some reason, and no matter who was causing it, something had gone wrong.
Gah, I was well and truly drained of power myself. My head rung like the vibrating core of the stabilizer in an air-rider. The dizziness rocking the world reminded me of my first time in space.
One of the Frelsi air-riders racing toward the tower began to surpass me overhead—
“Slow up!” I yelled to the pilot.
She didn’t. She zoomed toward the field with her lips pursed like she could taste the medals of honor already—and her air-rider shut off abruptly in mid-air.
I swerved upward as she fell like a stone; my hand shot out to snatch her collar, yanking her off her seat; her air-rider dropped out from between her legs and crashed below us with a floral explosion.
“I told you to slow up, soldier,” I said, zipping a ninety-degree turn and swooping my vehicle down toward the street. As soon as the over-eager hero’s feet touched dust, I released her collar, and leapt down off my air-rider, leaving it idling on the ground just outside the wave of darkness. Other small vehicles were falling out of the sky like flies around an electric zapper. We both trotted forward into the darkness, and looked up, up, up at the towering wall of light.
“Is it the Anomaly?” my unwanted companion yelled, coughing and rubbing her neck as she recalled the nightmare of Sterba’s power in Frelsi slang.
“No,” I said. But I didn’t know any more than she did. I looked at the street around me, and at the items on my person. I didn’t have any juice left for electromagnetic shenanigans.…
A leaf fluttered by my boot in the dust. I stomped it, picked it up, and held it out into the lightning.
It wasn’t lightning. The leaf didn’t singe. It sparked, and stuck in the wall as if in a spider’s web. It’s some kind of a photon-emitting static surge. My lips tightened. This is Lem’s.
“You mind getting stung, Captain Seria?” I asked, turning to the fallen air-rider pilot who I just now recognized.
She raised and cocked her flayer rifle. “Only if you do,” she grinned—the kind of grin that told you she just knew she looked cool in the eerie shadows, with her bangs blowing about her perfect sweaty face. The grin of the Miss Perfect who’d won the promotions while the rest of us got screwed for the cause, of the overachiever who’d leave you bleeding if you failed Frelsi excellence. She’d constantly tried to get with me before I fell into disgrace—and then she’d gone far, far out of her way to find evidence for Command to exile Lem, to convince them that our version of last year was too sick to believe. A ribbon-hunter and show-stopper, she was what I was once, and I’d never act on it, but for a split second I wanted to shove her into the energy field to exorcise my past self.
“Your flayer rifle’s dead,” I said instead, nodding to the core of her weapon, darkened after the EMP wave. Her action hero pose deflated, but I didn’t have time to take pleasure in glimmers of petty payback. The field washed over me.
It did sting, like the strike of a whip during my first captivity, or the shock waves Diebol used to power me down—bloodseas, these memories—but it wasn’t for long. I shoved forward, swimming through energy, and with a pained grunt and a breath found myself inside the sky-high dome of electricity.
It was hollow in here, as bright as a searchlight, with everything cast in stark shadows. The buzzing stilled. I didn’t have time to guess why—some wave canceling out some other wave in phase—but the almost muffled quiet seemed pregnant with doom.
Seria stumbled in after me without flinching—hate her or not, we were still surrounded by Growen housing here, and I needed her warrior’s scowl at my back. I signaled with two fingers above my head, and she dashed to the right side of the street to get some cover. I ran to the left side to keep my back to the nearest building. Heads on a swivel and dead weapons raised for bludgeoning, we crossed the rows of winding alleyways toward the base of the tower. I didn’t bother to report in on my wristband—Faraday-protection or not, even that little green screen lay dark against my skin.
Our footsteps seemed muffled. Sweat misted my jumpsuit—I kept expecting the buildings to burst open with mechanized horrors. It was quiet, like this, back then. Make it happen already, stop putting it off, my nerves yelled. I told them to shut up. Across the street, Seria’s shoulders hunched, and her knuckles blanched with the force of her grip on her weapon; her hardened steel face just dared memory to filk with her. She rubbed her throat where her collar had given her a friction burn after I snatched her off her air-rider to save her from crashing. As much as she angered me … well, she was one of the last fighting-age survivors from Fort Jehu last year. It wasn’t for nothing that she’d pushed hard to get rid of Lem.
A sudden pounding vibrated the wall at my back—the loss of power had sealed the polymerwalls shut. Inside, blitzers not poisoned by laundry found themselves in the dark surrounded by comatose bodies. Powered down, none of their weapons could break the expensive seals they themselves had double-reinforced.
“Help! Someone help!”
But we didn’t. We knew what it felt like: the confusion, the strange betrayal when a helpful everyday object turns on you—in that moment, you find yourself believing in possession and poltergeists.
It was why everyone needed a scapegoat in the em-powered traitor who was AWOL when our world went to hell.