Gods of Blood and Bone (Seeds of Chaos Book 1) (56 page)

“Yes. Quite the oddity, isn’t it?” Nadia Petralka said. “We’d never seen anything like it before, either.”
 

“This is your top-secret lab, right? Where are all the people, the scientists?”

“They evacuated, Eve, along with physical documentation of their work up to this point, and anything else they could carry. They were on their way out of here as soon as the alarms went off. Without being able to monitor you properly, we weren’t exactly sure of your plan. But I believed you’d survive your little “excursion,” even if no one has stayed there and lived before, so I didn’t let down my guard. From where the Rabbit group Moderator was tampering around, we thought they might be at risk.” She walked to a huge table in the center of the room and started tapping away at it, turning on the touchpad screen. “I’d like to show you something.”

I moved to stand beside her, and looked at the surface of the table as a video expanded atop its surface.
 

“I apologize for the quality of these first few clips. It’s a bit difficult to make out. We weren’t sure at first, either. We thought maybe it was debris in the upper atmosphere, or an unauthorized mission from another country.”
 

The video was indeed blurry, shaking as something small and indistinct flew across the screen. The next clip was clearer, though the image was still bad. Something gray shot through the sky far above a line of tall buildings, dipping out of the worst pockets of smog clouds every few seconds. The next was even clearer, and showed the strange plane slicing through the air, avoiding the shots and missiles of the fighter jets racing after it.
 

The dark grey aircraft flipped up some of the joints on its tail end, dipped one wing, and turned on a dime to shoot back at them. They fell out of the sky like fiery spitballs.
 

“What is this supposed to be?” I asked, having a feeling I already knew the answer. That aircraft wasn’t like anything I’d seen on Earth. But in the last few months, I’d been introduced to a lot of things I’d never seen before. In Estreyer, the Trial world.
 

The Commander was staring at the screen intently. “This is the first recorded and verified alien invasion of Earth. We’re calling it Breach Zero.”
 

There was a huge, silent explosion across the screen then, as something hit one of the ships and blew up. The blast seemed much too big and violent for the relatively small size of the ship. When the shock wave reached the recording camera, the video cut out in a short burst of static, and another clip took its place.
 

“The attempted air strikes, seven years ago…” I trailed off as my mind whirled.
 

“P.R. had to put some sort of spin on it. Something the public could understand, something they could deal with. Terrorists have always been great news. And the outcry allowed us to put more defensive measures in place against the real threat.”
 

On the table’s huge screen, men in hazmat suits, machine guns in hand, walked toward the downed alien ship. The camera was obviously attached to someone’s faceplate, because it dipped up and down with every step, and swung dizzyingly when its wearer looked around. The picture was grainy, and static kept rolling across the screen as if someone was waving a large magnet close to the camera.
 

But I could see clear enough as they pried open the side of the hatch with a large machine and inched inside, their weapons at the ready. The cameraman stepped inside after them, and the view dipped and swung as he maneuvered the makeshift entrance. Inside, the gray walls rippled, shining like silk, but hardened instantly at the touch of one of the suited men. There wasn’t much left loose, but what there had been was strewn about. A small tree with orchid-like flowers was bent in two, leaking sap onto the floor, and vases filled with colored sand had tipped and broken, spilling their contents.
 

They walked farther in, and saw a small dead animal on the floor. Its mouse-like body had been crushed under a piece of fallen furniture, its bushy tail sticking straight up in the rigor mortis specific to its species. There was nothing like it on Earth, but I recognized it as one of the rare semi-friendly creatures from Estreyer. A lump in my throat was making it hard to breathe, but I kept watching.
 

The cameraman moved past the creature as someone else bagged it in a vacuum sealed hazmat pouch. They moved into the cockpit, or command center, or whatever you wanted to call it. In the back of the room a large metal sphere hung from the ceiling, with floating bands of different colored, different shaped metals orbiting around its axis.
 

“The Shortcut,” Commander Petralka said. “Kind of a goofy name, but when one of our scientists figured out what it did, he started calling it that, and the name stuck.”
 

The strangely designed controls in the front of the cockpit were abandoned, and when the cameraman stepped farther in, the body in front of the metal sphere came into view.
 

On the floor lay a giant, beautiful blonde man with shoulder length hair and a golden beard, trimmed neatly. He was laying on his back with one arm underneath his body, and one leg twisted oddly. He had obviously been injured and fallen, and seemed to be unconscious.
 

I remembered the force of the explosion and amended my assessment. He was very likely dead. I felt sick.
 

Then the video cut, and it was the man again, this time bound and chained and locked on a huge metal slab in the center of a room. The camera was high above, at an angle, as if it was placed at a corner of the ceiling. The man had wires and patches and tubes running all over and piercing into him. His eyes were closed, but I knew he couldn’t be dead, or they wouldn’t have restrained him so.

A much smaller man in a white coat came in with a clipboard and poked him in the side with a metal rod.
 

The man—was it a man? He woke in an instant, and I saw the spark of electricity jumping from the end of the rod as the man in the white coat jerked it back.
 

The giant looked around, straining against his bonds, roaring at his attacker with enough force to send the normal-sized man staggering backward. His huge muscles bulged and strained, and then the shackles around one wrist started to bend, twisting both the metal clamp and the slab it was melded down onto.
 

Before he could rip the arm free, armored men burst into the room from doors in each of the walls and started to shoot him with little darts that I supposed were tranquilizers, while ushering the white-coated man out.
 

The giant ignored the darts in his skin for a few moments, shaking his head in rage and continuing to strain against his bonds. But as soon as the men were gone from the room, the doors closed again and thick gas started to pour from holes placed all along the outside of the walls. He was half obscured, but I could see him slump and fall back again to the metal slab, senseless.
 

There was another clip of him, snarling at a camera held at a lower angle, as if by a human. “My people…will kill…you all!” he snarled in English with a strange lilting accent.
 

The video clip cut off, and this time no other replaced it.
 

“The last one was taken a few months after we downed his ship and captured him. It seems his race is significantly intelligent, to learn our language so quickly. Or maybe I should say his species?” Commander Petralka, who I’d almost forgotten about, shrugged beside me. “Breach Zero hit most major military facilities around the world. We’re fairly positive it was only a scouting mission. A test of our responses.”
 

She chuckled bleakly, and turned away from the table. “Unfortunately, we failed that test miserably. Come on, the tour isn’t over yet.”
 

I followed her silently, for once at a loss for words.
 

“Almost all of their ships escaped unharmed as we scrambled to do something, anything, to counter their attacks. We destroyed a couple of ships, but managed to take this one mostly intact, along with some of their technology, like the Shortcut. After that, every single nation of the world banded together military resources in preparation for the coming war.”
 

“War coming, when?”
 

“Soon. Less than a year. Maybe less than six months. We’ve got a rough idea of when the ones that escaped will be bringing reinforcements. That is, if none of the other ships had some different form of FTL communication or transportation that we don’t know about.”
 

“FTL, meaning faster than light?”
 

“Yes.” She opened the door out of the lab, and led me down a different hallway, to an elevator. “If it takes them as long as we estimated to make the round trip. It all depends on how quick to mobilize military forces they are.”

“And you’re sure reinforcements are coming back?”

She stopped and stared at me for a moment, then continued walking and talking as if I hadn’t asked such a stupid question. “We have permission to enforce a mandatory draft from the citizenry. Kind of like martial law, except no one knows about it yet, unless they’re part of it.”
 

“Like me.” I followed her onto an elevator, which started a long, dark descent into the heart of the earth.

“Yes.” Her lips twitched at the look on my face. “The Constitution and human rights? Is that what you’re thinking? Those don’t mean as much as you might think in the face of our extinction as a species.”
 

“Some would say the life of an individual is worth as much as the life of the masses.”
 

She snorted. “That someone would die
along with
the masses when these things come back. They’re different than us. Let me show you one last thing, Eve. I think you’ll find it enlightening.”
 

She was silent after that, and we stepped out of the elevator into a room, so deep inside the earth I could feel the weight of thousands of tons of dirt pressing down, pushing the air against my skin.

Chapter 40

I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. I am the creator and destroyer of worlds. So sayeth the gods.

— Eve Redding

I knew the details of that moment would remain forever clear in my mind. I stepped forward and looked through an observation window. The giant was tied up alone in the middle of a large room, connected to tubes, wires, and machines, and enough straps and shackles to confine a large elephant. The metal slab he lay on was tilted forward, so that we could see his whole body, half-standing, half-lying on it.
 

“The window is a double-sided mirror, triple paned and bulletproof. He can’t see us or get to us.”

I felt uneasily as if she was saying that mostly to comfort herself. A couple steps brought me close to the window, which had little wires threaded all through it.
 

Even bound, I could sense his terrifying strength, and a strange sense of
other
-ness that caused all the small hairs on my body to stand up in alarm. My skin was crawling with unease, but not abhorrence.
 

He didn't seem that different than us, if indeed quite a bit larger than the average human. In fact, he was beautiful, lying there with his eyes closed. Long dark lashes fanned out on his cheeks, a contrast to the dirty, once-blonde hair that hung down matted and tangled, past his face and his equally unkempt golden beard. It had grown bushy and wild since the video was taken. Dark circles lay under his eyes like those of a raccoon, standing out against his pale, drawn skin.
 

Skin no longer bronze and healthy, and a body that no longer looked as if it held the strength of ten men. Despite it all, I knew he would reign down terror and destruction that would make my own look like a child's tantrum if he were ever freed.
 

His eyes snapped open, looking right into my own.
 

I jumped, and my heart smashed in a quick burst of fear, trying to punch its way out of my chest. I stared back into his eyes, wondering if he could see me through the glass despite the woman's assurance to the contrary. We stared at each other for a long moment, until Petralka said, "This. This is what stands against us, coming to destroy us." She laid a hand on my shoulder, as if to keep me from moving too close to the glass.

Something changed in him, then. His upper lip lifted away from his teeth in a snarl, ever so slowly. Then he went berserk, roaring and heaving at his bindings. He strained until his face turned red, snapping his teeth at us.
 

An alarm started to go off, and a milky white liquid ran through a tube from one of the machines, into his neck. He weakened and calmed, but still stared out from his incapacitated body with malevolence.
 

"They think they're gods," she said. "And compared to us, they might as well be. Which is why we're creating gods of our own."

"You're drafting soldiers to fight an alien invasion," I said. "How crazy does that sound?" I laughed humorlessly. "But why do it like this? It seems kind of counterproductive to actually gaining a fighting force. You take kids, basically, with no military inclinations, and leave them to their own devices. Why not allow volunteers, or recruit from within the military, or at least cultivate them and train them from the beginning?"
 

"We do recruit from within the military, if the genetics are right. We found out early on that the Seeds weren't compatible with a large majority of the population. Only people with a certain gene sequence can adapt. The survival rate is higher in younger people, which is why we aim for them. And the Game is designed to create a specific type of person. We are looking for people who will adapt, and fight, and survive against horrifying odds. The type who can make it without someone holding their hand," Commander Petralka said.