Hunted (31 page)
Once upon a time, that mall held a fifty-meter-high flame on one side and an even taller tornado on the other, both real and roaring but never moving from their positions. Gawking tourists used to argue whether the envoys actually lived in the wind and fire, or if it was just a flashy gimmick aimed at impressing lesser species. None of us ever learned the truth…but the night Queen Verity died, the flame and tornado winked out of existence in the exact same second. It was a sign, if anybody needed one, that the higher echelons of the League were turning their backs on Troyen. By dawn, every other embassy had been evacuated too—no one wanted to go down with a sinking ship.
Now, here we were, back again.
There must have been a door or something closing off the stairwell from the roof, but it had vanished into the general wreckage. Still, the roof itself seemed in pretty good shape—at least the back half was. My eyes were getting used to the darkness; as we came up the final ramp, I could see a flat expanse of those smooth crystal bricks, with no dips or sags all the way to the rear edge of the building. Tobit checked with the Bumbler and grunted a few seconds later. “It looks safe,” he announced. “If you want to trust the engineering judgment of a stupid machine.”
“Any sign of the Explorers?” Dade asked.
Tobit fiddled with dials and peered at the Bumbler’s screen. “No…no…wait. Back there in the shadows,” he said, pointing at the far rear of the roof. “I think it’s an Explorer’s backpack.”
Dade immediately started forward, but Festina grabbed his arm. “You and Tobit stay here. In case the roof isn’t as solid as we think.”
“And in case it’s a trap,” Tobit muttered.
“Why would it be a trap?” Dade asked.
“Because
anything
could be a trap!” Tobit growled. “We don’t know dick about what’s going on. Someone may have lured us here with a fake signal so they could blow us to smithereens. And don’t say that doesn’t make sense, junior—stuff that doesn’t make sense can still make you Go Oh Shit.”
Festina was already heading toward the knapsack. Since nobody stopped me, I jogged a few paces and caught up with her. Side by side, we walked toward the building’s rear…and the farther we went, the less I cared about the pack and the more I worried about something else.
The smell of buttered toast trickled through the air.
Like I said, the back of the Fasskister embassy faced the palace—just a stone’s throw from the diamondwood palisade surrounding the palace grounds. Shining from inside that wall came the glow I’d thought was cookfires. A dull red glow.
The queen-shaped palace had its tail toward us, but not quite straight on. There was enough of an angle that we could see along its body, past the glass conservatory domes, up the torso, all the way to the head and its outstretched claws.
Moss. Balrog moss. Covering every square millimeter of the building from the venom sacs forward. In the dark, it glimmered a very self-satisfied crimson.
36
LYING LOW ON THE ROOF
“Holy shit,” Festina whispered.
I just nodded. The buttered-toast smell was making me dizzy.
“That queen,” Festina said. “The one who dumped those spores on the Fasskisters. She must have left some here too—to make the place uninhabitable for the Black Army.”
“Kind of hard on her own guards,” I said. It gave me a crawly feeling, thinking about that. I could understand a queen setting up a nasty parting gift for her enemies, but not when it would also hurt her own subjects. Protecting your citizens should always be your number one concern, shouldn’t it? A king who didn’t put his people’s safety ahead of his own hunger for revenge…
A
queen.
I meant a
queen
who didn’t put
her
people’s safety ahead of
her
hunger for revenge…
Never mind.
Festina growled under her breath. “That fucking Kaisho. She had to know about this.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She took that damned satellite photo,” Festina said. “The whole front half of the palace should have been glowing, for Christ’s sake. But there wasn’t any shine in the shot she showed us. She must have deliberately told the computer to filter out the red.” The admiral made a disgusted sound in her throat. “And I never double-checked. I checked the landing site, and the spot where the signal came from, but I never bothered to look at the palace. Sloppy, Ramos—really sloppy.”
“You didn’t know,” I said.
“I knew enough,” she snapped. “Kaisho has jerked us around time and again. I kept letting her do it, in the hope she’d go too far and we could justifiably whack her. But enough is enough.” She tapped a button on her wrist, changing the channel on her radio. “Tobit, Dade: full paranoia mode.”
Dade’s voice sounded in my ear, even though he was standing back at the stairwell. “I thought we already
were
in full paranoia mode.”
Festina sighed and rolled her eyes. “What can you do with a kid like that?”
“Um,” I said, “if you want I can keep an eye on—”
That’s when the cannons started firing.
A real soldier probably wouldn’t call them long-distance guns—they were shooting from the top of the palace toward that kill zone beyond Prosperity Water. Only about a kilometer; in artillery terms, that was practically point-blank range. But from where we were standing, the shells looked like they were zooming past us and heading way off in the distance before they blew up.
Of course, we didn’t stay standing too long.
I dropped flat to the roof. Festina did a dive, then rolled to her feet again, fists up…like it was some pure reflex to hit the dirt and come out fighting. A second later, she threw herself onto the roof again, cursing in a language I didn’t understand. Spanish, I guess. Considering how comfortable she was swearing in English, she must have been
really
mad this time.
Another boom of a cannon. While its thunder still echoed from nearby buildings, Dade’s voice came over my earphone. “It’s all right,” he babbled excitedly, “they’re firing over our heads. Shelling the enemy.”
“And what happens,” Tobit growled, “when the enemy starts shelling back? If the guns are a few degrees too low, we’re bang in the line of fire. How do you think this building got wrecked in the first place?”
Good point. The front of the embassy could have got hit by a barrage intended for the palace—just a few hundred meters short, that’s all. How long ago would that have been? When the Black Army first surrounded Queen Temperance? Or back earlier in some other battle…maybe when Temperance herself grabbed the palace from whoever held it before her.
“What do we do?” Dade called over the radio. “Leave?”
“No,” Tobit and Festina snapped in unison.
“We’re here to pick up fellow Explorers,” Festina said a moment later. “We stay until we absolutely have to go.”
“Yeah,” Tobit put in. “We aren’t going to get another chance down here.”
He was right. If the palace was firing, the Black Army must be attacking out on the defense perimeter—going for their final offensive. The moment they saw our Sperm-tail, someone must have called the attack.
Someone. Maybe Sam. Whose time of waiting was over.
In a few hours now, the war would end…right where it started, inside the high queen’s palace. There’d be fighting in the halls, just like the night Verity died—loyal palace guards without a queen, just trying to survive till the dawn. It made me feel guilty, realizing I was soon going to run off on them again. We’d pick up the other Explorers, or we’d decide they weren’t coming and hightail it back to
Jacaranda.
Either way, I was abandoning a lot of warriors, when I should be there with them, helping them, leading them…
Wait a minute—what the heck was going through my head? I was no leader.
The cannons fired again. I covered my ears and tried not to think.
Festina began to crawl on her belly back to Tobit and Dade. It didn’t look very graceful, her in that big fat tightsuit…but she moved surprisingly fast, and if you took your eyes off her the tiniest split second, she disappeared. That camo was
good.
I started to crawl too, then stopped. The Explorer’s backpack was still lying on the roof behind me; Festina hadn’t had a chance to look at it. I turned around and slithered up to it, sniffing furiously.
It smelled of the same stuff as the tightsuit, plus the odor of a male human. No trace of female scent. Maybe Plebon had been here an hour ago to send the contact beep, but Olympia Mell hadn’t been with him.
Was that a bad sign? I couldn’t tell.
I sniffed at the knapsack again, not sure what I was looking for. Even if the pack was booby-trapped with some kind of bomb, I wouldn’t know what explosives smelled like. Anyway, there were a whole lot of odors jumbled together: Explorer stuff, like a radio transmitter, and food rations, and a Sperm anchor…
My fingers twitched. I didn’t make them do that. Uh-oh…getting possessed again.
I watched as my hands reached out and flipped open the pack. Nothing went boom. That was the good news. The bad news was my hand scrabbling into the mess of equipment and pulling out the little anchor box.
“Edward!” Festina called over my earphone. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The spirit that possessed me didn’t answer. It set the anchor down on the roof and flicked the activation switch.
I didn’t even see the Sperm-tail coming—it was somewhere behind my back, still flipping and flapping, swishing aimlessly across Unshummin and far out into the countryside, like some cat-toy bouncing on a string. One second it was a dozen kilometers away; the next instant, it had snapped into place against the anchor, plastered to the side of the little box with only the tip of its mouth hanging free.
Festina’s voice rang loud in my ear. “Turn off the anchor, Edward. Turn off the anchor!”
Too late. The Sperm-tail’s tiny mouth suddenly became a nozzle squirting out a crowd of newcomers: Counselor, Zeeleepull, Hib & Nib & Pib, exploding out of the tube, smacking down hard on the crystal-brick roof. I could feel the impact under my feet; it must have jarred the Mandasars to their very bones. Right behind them was Kaisho in her hoverchair, shooting forward, spinning sideways, almost flipping over in a somersault…till the chair’s stabilizers kicked in and pulled upright with a whine of engines.
They must have been waiting, I thought. They must have been right there in Jacaranda’s transport bay, all set to come through the moment the anchor came on.
How did they know what would happen? Had the spirit possessing me set this whole thing up?
But the spirit had one more trick to play. Before I could react, my own foot lifted high and smashed the anchor box under my heel.
Electronic guts spilled onto the bricks. The glittering Sperm-tail whipped away and disappeared from sight.
“Dade, quick, Dade!” Festina yelled. “The other anchor—turn it on.”
“What?” the boy asked. “Why?”
“Turn on the fucking anchor!” Festina roared.
He’d set it down on the roof back near the stairwell. Dade threw himself across the bricks, bounced once on his tightsuit stomach, then landed within arm’s reach of the box. He slapped his hand on the switch…and nothing happened.
Nothing happened for a long time.
I lifted my head. The Sperm-tail was nowhere in sight.
“Ohhhh,
fuck!
” Tobit groaned. He skittered across the roof toward Dade, pulling his Bumbler with him. With the Bumbler’s scanner, he started a quick once-over of the anchor box…maybe checking for malfunctions.
Meanwhile, Zeeleepull struggled to straighten himself up to his usual height. He and his hive-mates looked winded from their landing—slapping down hard on the unforgiving roof. With all their weight, Mandasars fall a lot more heavily than humans.
“Teelu”
he gasped, “help how?”
“Help?” I asked. The spirit possessing me had quietly let go. “Help how who?”
“You,
Teelu.
Radioed you for help.”
“I didn’t radio for help. I don’t even have a transmitter.”
“But the captain said—”
“Oh, The captain.”
I didn’t need to hear more. If Prope had lied to the Mandasars about receiving a call for help—if she’d hurried them and Kaisho into the transport bay and waited for the Sperm-tail to get anchored again—she had to have
known
the spirit inside me would turn on the anchor, then smash the box to free the tail.
Which meant Prope was working with the spirit. She might have been pheromoned into doing it…but more likely, the spirit had used my father’s access codes to send instructions in the Admiralty’s name. That’s what I’d done when I’d found myself sitting all dopey at the captain’s terminal: the spirit had given Prope orders to maroon us here.
But why? I thought the spirit was on my side. Back on Celestia, it had
helped
me—pretty well saved my life and Festina’s. So why turn against us now? Unless its purpose had just been to keep us alive till we got to Troyen…
I scanned the night sky again. No dancing Sperm-tail anywhere…as if
Jacaranda
had reeled up its fishing line and headed for home. Across the roof, Dade and Tobit were poking at the anchor box, but I knew there was nothing wrong with it.
Jacaranda
had simply flown away. With Kaisho and the Mandasars down on Troyen, no one on the departing starship would raise a fuss that we’d all been abandoned.
From the start, Prope had been ordered to dump me someplace nasty. I just never suspected I’d help her do it.
