CHAPTER EIGHT
Diebol
Oh, Jei thought he was clever, did he?
Diebol heard the whispering even before he blinked into the hallway in his mind. It had been a long day prepping for the offensive on Forge. Diebol always had his go-bag ready so there was nothing to pack, but with personnel to brief, ship inspections to double-check, flight plans to approve, and of course, the safety of the all-important cargo to ensure—well, when not stalking through someone’s office or a cement hangar bay, he’d been texting, calling, or manning the intercom non-stop to fix everyone else’s errors.
Now, after sprinting through the warm Alpino prairie in a dusty windstorm, he’d ducked into a janitorial closet for a moment of rest and recuperation.
But as he tilted his head back against the nearby trash-bot to close his eyes, he heard them. Evil ideas and wicked spells whispered just beyond his hearing. He couldn’t quite make out the words, but he hated them already.
“Jei, what did you do …” Diebol grumbled aloud.
He stepped into the hallway in his mind.
All that pristine ivory was covered in words. Not just Diebol’s hallway, either. Jei had painted his own hallway, and the cage, too.
“Ech.” Diebol tried to wipe the wall off with his sleeve. It stained like blood, and glowed. Diebol’s skin crawled with something moist … he shuddered, but resisted the urge to rip the words off himself. Couldn’t let Jei take pleasure watching him come undone. He paced forward, struggling to keep his eyes away from the words everywhere. Trite, pithy sayings at the best; slurs in support of interdimensional tyranny at worst.
Oh, it got worse.
The darkness that surrounded the cage between Diebol’s hallway and Jei’s? That change. That was worse.
Glowing words illuminated ugly truths: over there on Jei’s side, some kind of blackened corpse floated in a dusty corner, and ugly jewelry draped across old furniture that cluttered a space once hidden in clean onyx shadows. Shyte, had this room always been so small? Even from here in Diebol’s hallway, that dead body seemed close enough to hit with a stone’s throw. Diebol had always thought the abyss between himself and Jei much bigger.
And here, as he reached the end of his own dirty whispering hallway …
“Jei …” Diebol growled.
By the glow of an inane phrase scrawled in some ancient language—“Ani hu ha ohr”—Diebol could see Bricandor’s hooded cloak floating empty in the shadows. It waited for him, and he despised it. Bricandor. The Growen leader who manipulated the universe with decoys and politics instead of coming right out and saying why he fought. The traitor who promised to stamp out the interdimensional Njandejara while cavorting with an interdimensional of his own. Diebol stepped into the darkness with his head low and shoulders hunched.
“Die,” Diebol muttered.
But the cloak followed him, bobbing in the air, a phantom of the future, and now he could see whips and electric wires littering the floor all across his side. He’d always rushed through this space with the sensation of something following him, and didn’t appreciate the obvious revelation Jei forced upon him. Yes, he knew. He knew he lived in Bricandor’s shadow. Thank you.
Diebol didn’t even reach the cage. Oh, he wanted to. He wanted to summon Jei, to punish him. Work off some steam. But he couldn’t stand it in here anymore. He would come back later to clean it off. Right now, though, he needed to leave, before the infected air cursed him, too.
No matter. He would see Jei in person soon.
LEM
A light breeze filtered through Lem’s puffed hair; her dark coils frizzed out of control in this humidity, but she’d take that over the cold of Beryllia any day. She didn’t love the sweat dripping down her spine, though.
Retrack City sprawled below the two Paradox Warriors now, a tangling cluster of metal and noise in the center of the bustling jungle. From here, atop the water tower on the hill, they could see the white spaceport hub stretching for the sky like a Revelonian cloud tree, long spindly metal branches sprouting into wide landing platforms. Ships buzzed around the spaceport like hummingbirds flitting along white flowers.
Jei’s eyes strayed toward the art district, and the colorful airships that floated there trailing tiny silhouettes on rope. The girl he’d fallen in love with had been a sky-dancer.
Lem laid a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Jei said nothing, but his back seemed to relax under her palm.
Shyte, for some reason this made her miss Cinta, and being a little sister cuddled up with all that fur in the Biouk nest years and years ago.
“Let’s roll,” Lem said.
Jei sighed, and they got to work. He crouched to begin sawing open the water tower with the laser edge of his mace handle; Lem shimmied down the tower leg with an explosive remote in her mouth and a backpack full of bombs.
Retrack had always posed a problem for Frelsi invading forces because of the spaceport: with the thick jungle almost impossible for landing, both civilian and military ships came through the spaceport, so either you bombed it and took out a bunch of interplanetary civilians, or you left it, and the Growen flooded the city with reinforcements. Retrack’s tightly-woven streets and alleyways left no room for tanks without significant civilian casualties, either, and there was always the risk that no matter what you did the Growen would carpet-bomb the citizenry and blame it on the Frelsi to the media. They needed to separate the enemy from the civilians.
There was one break, though. Retrack City had a civilian curfew—in about an hour, no one without a military permit would be out in the streets. So that was a good time to set off some explosions by the water tower. Bring out soldiers only, and all that good shyte. That didn’t solve the problem of the spaceport reinforcements, but Jei had a reputation that would bring every last blitzer out to him: no need for any all-out firefights in the streets between Growen and Frelsi armies. Frelsi ships couldn’t land in the spaceport without being shot down, and a heavy ground force couldn’t get close unnoticed, but Jei could, and a light Frelsi air-rider battalion could wait for his call far enough back from the perimeter to avoid detection until he called for them to occupy the city. Plus, Jei’s powers magnified with every opponent, so the more soldiers they could muster, the more power he had to take them out. At his baseline, Jei could em-pull about his weight, but when powered up by opponents, Jei could throw vehicles, smash buildings, hurl entire armies in the air with a pull, or a push.
Lem was here to make sure the spaceport closed to reinforcements—and test a new weapon. She’d always wanted to try an actually nonviolent solution to mass warfare, but they’d never had enough power to make it happen. You could stop a little kid from doing something stupid or evil because you had longer arms, but when you fought with someone your own size, you had to play dirty, and maybe kill, to protect your family. The solution to war, then, was to become so much bigger than your opponent that you didn’t even need to hurt them to stop them.
So—paralysis.
But not like shock-cartridges and stun blasts, since that required, well, aim, and put you at a disadvantage against the people trying to kill you. One of the Burburan expats at the Frelsi Hiding Place had created a paralytic that worked on liquid skin contact, so you could literally spray a rioting crowd, and put them all to sleep. Growen blitzers wore full space-ready armor, but they also had their laundry schedule standardized across the force—one of those small, insignificant details Lem had learned during her time with them.
Insignificant like the new weak spot in the underarm seam of the uniforms.
Lem slid down the hill of the water tower, soil and moss spraying around her boots. She vaguely remembered it wasn’t very Biouk of her to leave a scar in the dirt—more human, maybe even more Growen, than anything—but as she tumbled toward the bushes at the bottom she shook the thought out of her head. The city rose before her in tall mud rectangles and silver spirals. A glance behind her—Jei was well hidden at the top of the tower, and the guards asleep at the bottom of it remained propped up and unconscious, as they would for the next twenty-four hours. This now-tainted water tower supplied the western district, where the Growen barracks—and laundry—were located, by the foot of the spaceport.
Lem crouched to plant her first explosive in a shallow hole at the base of the hill, almost without stopping her slide. Twirl to the side, run along the hill—next explosive—all right—another couple meters—Lem counted paces with sawing breath, a bit weaker from her time on Beryllia despite her regular exercise regimen.
Aight, explosives done, time to cross the city. Jei should have delivered the sleep toxin into the water tower by now. “The field’s yours,” Lem said into the borrowed black communication pendant around her neck, diving out of the underbrush into someone’s yard at the edge of town. A hissing alarm sounded as she crossed the manicured lawn of perfectly round purple leaves—but alarm was kind of the point. Lem dashed to the nearest wall, a tall, mud-brick affair, and threw her electromagnetic pulse downward to propel herself up like a rocket.
“Roger that,” the pendant answered with a crackle. “You clear?”
“I’m clear.” Lem dashed across the roof and leapt to the next flat housetop. Twenty minutes to curfew. The last bus to the skyport would pass by the next street in five … four … three …
Lem jumped into the air, arms outstretched like a sky-lizard’s limb-sails. Her body slapped against the low-flying bus with a stinging thwack; sparks glittered around her, reflecting off the pink and silver surface—“Come on, stick, stick, pull,” she muttered, skin tingling and cold—her fingers clung like gecko feet as her biological static shock made her like a magnet. Hot wind battered her cheeks. She clambered under the bus’s left wing, behind the bulge of the engine turbine, to stay hidden from any blitzers they passed on the street.
And there were tons. From scouts in slim, heat-friendly light cloth with bare wrists and ankles, to standard blitzers covered toes to hair in atmosphere-modifying spacesuits, the city streets looked almost like a straight-up Growen base as the civilians crawled into their homes.
Well, it wasn’t really like a Growen base. Not with all these different buildings, the mud-towers and spirals, and the colorful ships. Growen outposts always looked either industrial or sterile to a girl who’d spent her formative years in the trees.
Dusk raced toward the bus as the base of the spaceport tower approached. Just in time, too—Lem’s fingers grew weary of the tingling, her biceps burned, and the hot wind in her face had her tearing up like a baby’s funeral.
Behind her, the explosions went off right on schedule.
“I hope I get a chance to see your work this time, Jei,” Lem chuckled.
“I hope not, it’s ugly,” he said. “Good luck on your end.”
“Psh, luck? Never had it. Never needed it. See you on the other side.”