Empire: Book 2, The Chronicles of the Invaders (The Chronicles of the Invaders Trilogy) (11 page)

CHAPTER 21

O
nce the Nomad vessel had docked safely with the
Envion
again, Paul instructed his unit—he was already thinking of it as “his unit”—to meet by the hangar, where the mysterious
Dendra
waited. Rizzo was the last to arrive. She had fresh blood on her hands, and some of it had streaked her face. Paul thought that she might have been crying, but he could not recall ever seeing Rizzo cry. It didn’t seem likely, somehow, or even possible.

“De Souza’s dead,” she said. “He must have passed away during the fight.”

Paul heard Steven swear, and an image of his mother’s disapproving face flashed through his mind. Oh, how he hoped the gentle, upright Mrs. Kerr would never have to hear of any of this killing and dying. Then her youngest son’s deteriorating language would be the least of her worries. And Paul swore too, for they had all liked and respected De Souza. He’d looked out for them, and never played favorites. Paul wished that someone had been with him when he died. De Souza had deserved better than to die alone.

Paul turned toward the hangar doors and hailed Galton, who was still in the secondary control center. With so many of the
Envion
’s systems down, the only way to be certain that anything would work was to leave it in Galton’s hands.

“Do you have an atmosphere reading from the hangar, Galton?”

“It’s clean—or as clean as it ever is.”

That was something, at least. It meant that the integrity of the hangar’s hull section had not been compromised, and the atmosphere was breathable. They could enter without suiting up. Unfortunately, the
surveillance cameras across the entire ship were no longer functioning, and the screen beside the entry door, which would usually have displayed an image of what lay behind it, was blank. When they entered the hangar, they would be going in without any foreknowledge of what might be waiting for them.

“What about lighting?” asked Paul.

“It looks like most of it went down with the cameras. I think you’ll have emergency illumination, but it’ll still be pretty dark in there.”

Bad. The last thing Paul wanted was to open those doors and come under fire from unknown assailants who could see them but who couldn’t be seen in turn.

“Can you patch me into their comms system?”

“I can try.”

While Paul waited, he tried to figure out how what had begun as a simple mission to check up on some scientists and engineers with a broken radio had somehow ended up with a crippled destroyer, the loss of the best part of two units, a gunfight, the destruction of one Nomad vessel and the capture of another, and the appearance of a previously unknown, and certainly hostile, silicon-based species. Oh, and not to forget the discovery of a tower left behind by another alien civilization, about which nobody had bothered to tell the dumb human recruits. It was possible that events could still take a turn for the worse, but—aside from the death of everyone else on board the
Envion
—it was hard to see how.

Paul heard a crackle in his ear.

“I’ve got a channel open, and their systems have responded,” said Galton. “You can talk to them now.”

“Hailing the craft in our hangar,” said Paul. “This is Lieutenant Paul Kerr, ranking Military officer on board the
Envion
. This ship is now under Brigade control. I order all occupants of your craft to disembark—
unarmed
—and lie facedown on the deck. You are being monitored. Failure to obey will be interpreted as a hostile action. Respond.”

The answer came back almost immediately.

“This is Councillor Baldus Tiray of the Illyri Council of Government. How can we be sure that this isn’t a trap?”

Peris looked at Paul.

“May I?” he said.

“Go ahead,” said Paul, noting once again how Peris was determined not to undermine his authority.

“Councillor Tiray,” said Peris. “I am Peris of House Gault, formerly of the general staff of Lord Andrus. We met once, a long time ago.”

There was a pause.

“I remember. You are far from Earth, Peris.”

“And you are far from Illyr. How many of you are there?”

“Two. Just my aide, Alis, and me.”

“Then I wish to confirm the truth of Lieutenant Kerr’s statement to you. The
Envion
is under Military control, but it is badly damaged, and an evacuation will be necessary. For security purposes, I would advise you to follow the lieutenant’s order: disarm, disembark, and make yourselves as comfortable as possible on the deck.”

Another pause. Paul could almost picture Tiray and Alis conferring. In their position, he might well have been cautious too. It didn’t take much imagination to picture Paul and Peris with a group of Nomads holding guns to their heads as they were forced to lure the survivors from the shuttle.

“We submit,” said Tiray at last. “We’re coming out. You’ll see that we’re unarmed, and we’ll keep our hands in the air until we’re on the deck.”

“We’ll be watching,” said Paul.

“Watching a blank screen,” Thula muttered.

“When did you get so surly?” said Paul.

“Sometime between waking up this morning, and now.”

“You need to have more faith in people. Just to help you find it, you can be first into the hangar bay with me.”

Thula sighed deeply.

“I don’t think that I want you as my lieutenant anymore.”

“Noted.”

Paul addressed Steven and Rizzo.

“We go in. You cover us from here. You see anything you don’t like, and you have my permission to fire at it.”

“I don’t like you,” said Thula to Paul as he loaded his shotgun. “Does that mean I can fire at you?”

“You love and respect me like a brother,” said Paul. “Ready?”

He held his finger above the door release button.

“I can’t stand my brother,” said Thula. “Ready.”

Paul hit it, and the door opened. He and Thula peered through the gap and saw two figures lying flat on the deck in a shaft of illumination from the open shuttle. Orange emergency lighting flashed from the walls.

“You keep them under your gun,” said Paul. “I’ll take the shuttle.”

They came in fast, Thula moving to a standing position over the two prostrate forms while Paul inched his way along the hull of the shuttle. He could see that the pilot’s and copilot’s seats were empty, but the angle prevented him from viewing the lower part of the shuttle’s interior. He would be exposed while he passed the open door but he had no choice. He backed up, the shotgun at his shoulder ready to fire.

The shuttle was empty.

Paul relaxed, perhaps for the first time since they had come in sight of the crippled
Envion
. His shoulders and back ached. He wanted to slough off his uniform and wash away the blood and filth, but the possibility of a shower was limited.

“Steven, Rizzo,” he said. “The shuttle is clear, but help me search the hangar.”

Paul was taking no chances, not when they were so close to safety, however relative.

Steven and Rizzo entered, and together the three young humans made sure that no one was hiding in the shadows of the dock. When they were done, they returned to where Thula continued to hold a gun over the two Illyri on the deck. They were still lying facedown in loose-fitting flight suits, their hands clasped over the backs of their heads. Paul ordered Steven to frisk them. He patted down the first one, found nothing, then moved on to the second. He was about halfway through the search when he paused and looked puzzled.

“They’re called breasts,” said a female voice from the floor, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d take your hands off them.”

Steven jumped back as though he’d been scalded. Thula looked at him with amusement.

“I could ask you if you found anything,” said Thula, “but I think we already know the answer.”

“You can get up,” Paul told the Illyri.

Peris stepped forward to help the male, the one called Tiray. Paul offered his hand to the female, Alis. He saw that she was small for an Illyri, with narrow golden eyes. She looked at his outstretched palm.

“Do you want to touch me inappropriately as well?” she asked.

Paul wasn’t sure if this was a trick question, but decided very quickly that the correct answer was no, so that was the one he gave. Alis accepted his hand, and he pulled her to her feet.

“Councillor Tiray,” said Peris, “this is Lieutenant Kerr.”

“We have a lot of questions for you—” said Paul, but a voice from his comms unit prevented him from saying more.

“They’ll have to wait, Lieutenant,” said Galton. “We’re losing all remaining systems rapidly. It’s a wonder the
Envion
has held together for as long as she has. I should just have time to send a distress drone into the wormhole before we start the evacuation.”

“No!” said Tiray. “You mustn’t do that.”

“We’re on a dying ship, far from home,” said Paul. “Regulations require that we inform the Military authorities of what’s happened here.”

“If you do, you’ll bring more of them down on us,” said Tiray.

“He’s right,” said Alis. “They’ll come.”

“Who, the Nomads?” asked Paul.

“I don’t believe that we were attacked by Nomads,” said Tiray. “And somehow, I don’t think you do either.”

There was a loud groan from deep in the ship, as though the
Envion
were crying out in agony.

“Lieutenant.” It was Galton again. “I wasn’t joking when I used the word
rapidly
. We’re in real trouble. The hull is coming apart.”

“Please, Lieutenant,” said Tiray. “I’m asking you not to send a distress call, not yet. If I must, I’ll
order
you not to.”

“Order me?” said Paul. “Under what authority?”

“Under the authority of the Council of Government of Illyr, which requires all Civilian representatives to be offered every courtesy by Military and Consular personnel, up to and including the use of ships, equipment, and any resources deemed necessary for the successful pursuit of a governmental mission. Article 15.21, I believe.”

Paul glanced at Peris.

“He is correct,” said Peris, although he had the decency not to look happy about it.

“But I don’t want to use Article 15.21,” continued Tiray. “So I’m pleading with you, Lieutenant: get us off this ship, hear me out, and then decide upon the best course of action to take. For now, though, I guarantee that if a distress message is sent through the wormhole, the response will not be a rescue.”

Paul ran his fingers through his hair. Okay, so they weren’t dead, but their situation had somehow still managed to worsen. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t been there to see it.

“All right,” he said. “Galton, how long have we got?”

“Twenty minutes, but I’d be happier if we were gone in fifteen.”

Paul instructed Rizzo and Steven to gather as much food and water and as many medical supplies as they could lay their hands on, and take them to the Nomad ship, while he and Thula returned to the armory. Peris was left to take care of Tiray and Alis.

“We leave in ten,” Paul told them all. “Galton, do what you have to do, then get to that ship.”

“Understood, Lieutenant.”

Paul and Thula headed for the armory, but when they were out of sight of the others, Thula took Paul aside and showed him the pulser that he’d found on the Nomad vessel.

“It’s not locked,” he said. “I used it to kill one of those Nomads, or whatever they were.”

Paul took the pulser from him, set it to its lowest charge, and fired. The blast struck one of the dead bodies on the deck, causing it to shudder slightly.

“Who knows about this?”

“Only Steven, and I told him to say nothing.”

“Help me to gather as many of these weapons as we can from the dead, both pistols and rifles, then find a crate to put them in. We’ll seal the crate, store it with the other ordnance, and hide it in the cargo bay of the Nomad ship. You share this with no one else, you understand? And whatever you do, don’t let Peris see it.”

Paul left Thula to his work. From all of this chaos and bloodshed, something useful had emerged.

They had moved one small step closer to retaliation against the Illyri.

CHAPTER 22

A
s they often did, Ani and Syl sank into peaceful silence, picking up their books as if they were of the same mind. Syl smiled to herself as she watched her friend frowning over a dense tome entitled
The Science of the Mind, Volume 1
. The other five in the series were piled next to the sofa, gathering dust mockingly. Ani had never been particularly interested in reading until they’d come to this knowledge-infused place, but her lack of fingertip facts in their first classes had shamed her, particularly as the Gifted were watching—they were always watching—so she’d set herself the task of remedying the gaps in her education, plugging them with as many details as she could.

Syl herself was reading a dated but oddly alluring memoir she’d found forgotten in the largest library in the Twelfth Realm a few days before. It was called
The Interplanetary Pioneers
. The fat little volume had been crammed behind a pile of hand-tooled, leather-bound books she’d been instructed to alphabetize during her work duties. As with any library, even a repository as rarefied as the Marque suffered from the carelessness of its users, who would yank out volumes in haste and then haphazardly shove them back onto the shelves with scant regard for their order. Syl had pulled the tattered book from its hiding place, shaking her head at the carelessness of whoever had discarded it there. Absently she opened it and flicked to the first page, but soon she was sucked in, lost to those working around her, for it read like an adventure story, though it was in fact a true-life account of the Illyri’s first exploratory missions beyond their homeworld, which were either brave or foolhardy given the clunky, dangerous craft they appeared to have set out in. It was just the sort of thing she was interested in, for
surely the organism she’d encountered on Earth, the parasitic dweller in an Illyri skull, was not of this world, was not of
her
world.

She’d stood there reading until a Sister had clucked at her, nodding meaningfully at the disordered shelves. Reluctantly Syl had set the book to one side, but she’d taken it with her when she was dismissed from her duties, along with some other books about the early explorations. That was one thing that she actually did approve of on the grim old Marque: there was a seemingly unlimited supply of books, even here in the Novice libraries. Knowledge was prized, and the students were encouraged to read even more in their own time.

In this, at least, Syl was happy to oblige.

•  •  •

After a bit Ani slammed her book closed meaningfully.

“Hungry?” she said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Should we go get dinner?”

“I’ll meet you there. I just need to take a load to the laundry or I’ll have nothing to wear tomorrow. I’ve already worn this robe twice.”

“Slob. Imagine what Althea would say.”

They both looked toward the tiny kitchen with its sink piled with dirty cups and giggled.

“Maybe one of us had better do that tonight,” said Ani.

“Help yourself,” said Syl.

“Or maybe not,” said Ani. “Anyway. See you there.”

•  •  •

The laundry room was empty, the silent machinery set neatly into the carved rock. The only other furnishings were a pair of hard stools, and a lone sock lay forgotten and forlorn on the floor. Syl went to the largest machine and was hauling all the pale yellow and white washing from her bag, when there was a clatter on the floor.

Something sharp bounced off her soft slipper.

“What the . . . ?” She cast the pile to one side and looked down. At her feet rested an elegant set of keys, slim and shiny as dropped pins.
Baffled, she bent to pick them up. Where had they come from? Clearly from within her dirty washing, but neither she nor Ani had the need for a clutch of keys such as this.

It took her a moment to place them, and then like the proverbial lightning bolt she understood: these were Cale’s keys, the keys she’d been sent to fetch from Elda. The memory drifted back to Syl woozily, a poor copy of reality. Yes, there had been keys, of course there had: Oriel had handed Syl a bunch of keys to return to Cale, and then she’d tried to open Syl’s mind.

And Cale had asked her if she’d found them the next day, while Oriel still lay unconscious in the sickbay, but the entire altercation had had a strange fuzziness to it, soft focus and liquid after the mind dueling, and Syl had not been able to recall any keys. The issue of the keys was just one of the many troubling factors about Elda’s disappearance. From whispers she had overheard, Syl knew that Cale and many of the Sisters believed Elda to be hiding somewhere in the older sections of the Marque. It would not be the first time that a Novice—or, indeed, a more senior Sister—had retreated into its depths, for whatever reason: a fight with another Sister, perhaps, or bullying, or even madness. There was no shortage of hiding places in the old labyrinth. That was one of the reasons secure doors were installed.

So Cale had decided Elda must have taken the keys with her when she went off—“damned stupid girl”—and that had been the end of it. But now here they were, lying on the floor.

Syl snatched them up, her heart thumping with excitement and fear. She glanced around nervously to make sure nobody had witnessed what happened, her hand tight around the bunch as she slipped them into her pocket, then she leaned back against the wall, taking slow measured breaths to calm herself as she considered what she’d nearly done, the chance she’d nearly lost, for a wash cycle would surely have destroyed the electronic key codes embedded within each pin.

Time and again, Althea had drummed into her the importance of checking her pockets before washing her clothes, but since her governess had gone, she’d fallen out of the habit. Now Syl sank weakly onto the nearest stool and bowed her head, running her fingers through her
hair and licking the sweat from her lips. The keys might only open cupboards, but even drawers and cupboards could hold secrets, especially if they were locked.

And secrets were exactly what Syl was looking for.

“My God,” she said in English, just as the human staff at the castle in Edinburgh sometimes did, and she smiled to herself and thought now of Earth. She thought of her father; of his security adviser, Meia, who had proved to be so much more than that; of Althea; and of Paul, always Paul, and everything that had gone wrong and everything she had sworn to do.

And she remembered too the humans fighting in the Resistance, and the earthly gods, the old gods that the Illyri defector Fremd had spoken of, the gods he claimed were part of the soil and the sky and all the natural world. Normally she would have laughed off such superstitions, but right now she felt she had to thank somebody—or some
thing
—for she had just been very lucky indeed. She shook her head in wonder, her heart still thumping as she bent to finish loading the laundry, running her hand carefully through all the other pockets first.

While her clothes sloshed around in the laundry room, Syl went to the dining hall. Ani was at a table in the far corner with the nasty little Blue Novice Mila, but Syl wanted to be alone, to think, so she quietly filled a plate then sat by herself as inconspicuously as she could, eating a perfectly palatable stew made from some of the vegetables that were native to Illyr. The food in the Novice dining hall was typically Nairene: nutritious and healthy, but also bland because food was viewed primarily as fuel on the Marque—functional and necessary but nothing more, nothing less—so it tended to look worryingly like two-day-old roadkill. Most mealtimes Syl found herself fantasizing about the most ridiculous things: fries drowning in salt and vinegar, battered sausages from the café off the Royal Mile, a crunchy red apple, tea drunk with a sweet boy in a kitchen, a glass of milk from a cow, just a plain, earthly cow, the very notion of which would have sent the Novices around her into paroxysms of disgust. Again.

“Imagine!” one of them had squealed when Syl had requested milk
for her tea when she’d first arrived. “Just imagine drinking juices pumped from the teats of an alien!”

They’d gathered around asking what else Syl and Ani ate on Earth, wide-eyed and all too ready to be revolted as they learned of hamburgers, cheese, sushi, and even haggis. Ani threw the haggis in as a joke, though the pair of them had never even tried the stuff, and it elicited just the reaction she hoped for. She had elbowed Syl, amused.

“What does it taste like?”

“How can you even swallow it?”

“A burger is mashed cow? No!”

“Cheese is fermented cow juices?”

“Milk—gross!”

“What does milk smell like?”

Mila had appeared, and stepped between Syl and Ani, leaning in close and sniffing Syl theatrically.

“Oooh, you smell weird,” she said. “Maybe it’s the milk.”

She was speaking Illyri and her pronunciation of the English
milk
was completely wrong—she said “mil-
ik
”—but that didn’t deter the other girls, who gathered around, sniffing Syl and wrinkling their noses. Ani was squeezed out until she stood to one side with Mila, bemused as the sea of yellow robes made an island of her best friend.

“Oh, you do smell curious.”

“Come smell her. It’s odd.”

“Is
that
what milk smells like then?”

Xaron had appeared at Ani’s other side—startlingly like a stretched version of her stouter younger sister—and had smiled nastily at Syl over the throng of Novice heads, nodding approvingly.

“Yes. She’s smelly all right,” said Mila loudly, glancing at her older sibling for blessing.

“Very smelly,” agreed Xaron.

“No, she isn’t,” protested Ani, “and if she is, then I must be too.”

But the other blue-robed girls silently gathered as well, forming a barrier around Ani, shielding her from the slur. In this, Syl would stand alone.

Unfortunately, the epithet had stuck—Smelly Syl—and it was still
occasionally whispered or giggled in her presence even though the faint Earth odors that seemed so strange to the others had long since faded away. This evening it didn’t matter, though, and she didn’t even notice the lazy, unimaginative murmurs of “Smelly” from the others at the table when she plopped herself down at the end, for Syl could feel the treasure that was in her pocket, the clutch of keys that had the potential to open a whole new world of exploration and discovery, featherlight yet weighted with all her hopes. Where would she begin? When? How?

She ate the rest of her food quickly, barely tasting it, then all but skipped to the laundry, hauling her clean clothes from the big machine and bundling the warm, sweet-smelling robes and sheets together messily.

She couldn’t act rashly. She had to think about it, consider her options, make smart decisions. She would begin her search on another day, a better day, and then she’d see how far these keys could get her beyond the Twelfth and Thirteenth Realms. Soon she would tackle the Sisterhood afresh.