Lacuna: The Prelude to Eternity (19 page)

“Yes,” she said, glancing to the tip of the mountains, unable to shake the nagging feeling of worry that was worming its way inside her belly. “I think.”

“Do you need to go?”

She thought about it for a moment. Her first instinct was to run off to duty, but the more she thought about it, the more she just wanted to spend more time with John, listening to his stories, a world away from battles and death.

“Not right now,” she said. “I tell you what. Let’s keep walking. That way, you can tell me more of your jokes.”

“Okay,” said John, his eagerness returning. “In ancient Ireland, a woman spent ten years chasing after a leprechaun…”

They wandered north, away from the edge of the settlement and toward the mountains. Eden rested in a valley. The hillsides had been blasted clean during the orbital bombardment, waves of flames running up them. As they drew close, Liao could see fresh regrowth sprouting out of the thin black layer of charred remains. Plant life was returning from the ashes.

Somewhere, in that mess, was her arm, burned to nothing. It would not grow back. It was just ashes.

The night air seemed so distant. All she could smell was seared flesh.

Her scars burned, a phantom pain but no less real. It came as pins and needles over her upper body and the burned side of her face, a wave of pseudo-agony that forced the memories of the bombardment, raw and vivid, back into her mind.

She could feel the heat, see the flames, and hear the crackle of her own skin as it flaked off in charred, blackened lumps. It consumed her vision. She was no longer standing at the edge of a peaceful settlement that had not known war in months but the outskirts of Hell, the world burning around her.

The rational part of her brain told her she was just having a panic attack, a memory of trauma resurfacing, but its effects could not be dismissed easily. It flooded her body with fear and seized her lungs in an iron vice. The panic squeezed her whole body with pain.

“Captain,” said a faraway voice that sounded vaguely familiar. “Are you all right? Captain?”

Act.
She had to act. Her hands shook, violently at first, but less so as she forced air into her lungs and the spotty lightheadedness crept away.
Air. Just focus on air.

“I’m fine,” she managed, even forcing a smile.

John’s eyes were wide, and his whole body trembled.

“It’s okay,” Liao said again. “Just a bad memory.”

“What kind of memory?”

With the lights of the city behind her, and the fiery trails of falling stars darting across the night sky, growing in intensity, Liao pointed toward the mountainside with her prosthetic hand. “That’s was where I was burned.”

“Oh,” said John. “That must have been frightening.”

“It was.” Liao turned her back to it. She couldn’t even look.

John’s eyes kept flicking over the blasted landscape, and he fidgeted again.

“Sorry,” Liao said, “did you want to go?”

“Yes,” said John. “It’s late. Sorry. I should go.”

“Okay,” said Liao. Her tone turned serious. “You know… you
are
a funny man, John, and you have a good heart. You know what this place needs? A little more fun, a little more laughter. Go see Mister Shepherd. Tell him that I sent you. I think…” she smiled. “I think we need a stage. Put it where the
Beijing
was—there’s a great amphitheatre-style hole in the ground there now. Make it a central place where people can go and be entertained. Theatre. Comedy. Dramas. We could even rig up a projector and show movies. It’ll be like old Earth.”

John seemed pleased. “You would do that for me?”

“No,” said Liao. “I want to be clear about this: it’s not a charity.
You’re
doing this, and you’re doing it for yourself and everyone else in Eden. Okay?”

“Okay,” said John.

“Thank you for the walk,” she said and turned her eyes away from the settlement, where the glow of the fire intensified. “I have work to do, John.”

“Okay,” he said again, and then without looking back, he left, walking at a blistering pace.

She hoped he would be okay, but first, work called. Liao touched her radio. “
Beijing
, report status of the SAR bird.”

Jiang answered swiftly. “
Archangel
is en route, as are Marines from the
Madrid
.”

“Have they got room for one more?”

Jiang paused, presumably relaying her question. “Yes, Captain.”

“Tell the
Archangel
to swing past and pick me up. Home in on my signal. I want to see this for myself.”

The
Archangel
descended like its namesake, floating through the air, blowing the ashes away from her in a dark storm that dirtied her uniform and forced her to squint. The smell of everything burned was blasted into her skin, and as she climbed the loading ramp into the steel bird’s insides, the stink followed her. She left dirty footprints on the steel, black powder falling off her with every step.

[“Good evening Captain,”] said Saara from one of the fold-down seats, her large paws folded neatly in her lap.

Liao hadn’t even noticed her sitting there. “Good evening. Coming along to inspect the falling star?”

[“Commander Iraj believes the debris may be an escape pod, based on Brigadier General Decker-Sheng’s recommendations.”]

“Decker-Sheng?” Liao frowned. She pulled a helmet off the rack and clipped it on and then offered Saara one but realised right away it would not fit. “How the hell is he involved in this at all?”

[“We have detected microtransmissions being sent from Velsharn, short bursts of signal hard to separate from static unless you know what to look for. As Decker-Sheng is something of an expert in Alliance communication methods, Commander Iraj made the decision to request his help.”]

That ate at her, bitter bile forming in her throat. Liao pulled down a seat of her own, locked it in place, and strapped in. “Yes, well, aren’t you an expert too?”

[“Captain, I was only a pilot. I have a base knowledge of many things, more than enough to serve as your chief engineer, but I am hardly a specialist in covert operations.”

Saara’s exact phrasing surprised her. “Covert operations?”

[“There are few justifications for microtransmissions because they are hard to transmit and equally hard to receive, so they are usually reserved for signals one does not want detected.”] Saara’s tail twitched beside her. [“There are few other benefits.”]

The ship started to move. Liao rested her chin in her hands, fiddling with her helmet strap with her metal fingers. “And you mentioned that the transmission location was hard to pinpoint?”

[“Yes. As they are so brief—and difficult to detect—sourcing them can be difficult as their direction of transmission is obfuscated. The best way is triangulation, but at least four points must be actively listening in three-dimensional space, and with frequency rotation, this can be avoided. We were lucky that the
Beijing
detected them at all, let alone three others.”]

“So it could be a Toralii escape pod,” she said, “or it could be a transmission from within the fleet.”

The question seemed to surprise Saara. [“It is possible,”] she conceded.

Very possible. It had to be Decker-Sheng. Liao knew—somehow just
knew
—that he was behind it. He was the communication specialist and shared the same blood as Gaulung. She could practically smell his fingerprints all over this: sending covert signals to the Toralii, working his way into Iraj’s trust, being named
Sheng
.

If the Toralii had another mole aboard her ship, she would deal with it—differently than Gaulung Sheng, hopefully. Shooting a man had caused a lot of problems for her, and she knew that kind of thing was excusable only once.

The ship whined, Saara stared at her curiously, and Liao sat in silence, digesting the information and trying, largely in vain, to ignore the itching on her shoulder, which seemed to go away only when she thought about how she might use that information and the ways in which the Toralii would pay.

Eventually, a crack appeared around the edges of the loading ramp, and it lowered.

[“Are you all right, Captain?”] asked Saara as the large Toralii stood, eyes on the outside.

“Just being pensive,” she said, unstrapping herself and adjusting her helmet.

Saara studied her with her yellow eyes, a prolonged stare that Liao knew well. [“You believe there is a spy amongst the fleet.”]

“Correct,” she said, seeing no reason to lie to Saara, whom she trusted.

[“I would ask, then, that you keep this information to yourself. There are Toralii on Eden—including myself—and Kel-Voran and other visitors. Currently, your species and your allies are united in common purpose. Little would be gained from seeding mistrust amongst your allies.”]

“I agree,” said Liao. The noise from the ship’s engines died down, and in the distance, she heard another landing. “Don’t worry. I learnt from Sheng. If there’s a mole aboard, this time, I’m going to investigate properly.”

The memory of Sheng’s mistreatment seemed to disquiet her Toralii friend. [“I am pleased to hear this.”]

Liao beckoned toward the ramp. “Let’s go.”

They did not have to go far. The
Archangel
let them loose and then took off, hovering a few hundred metres above, its ventral turret following ahead of them.
 

The Broadsword from the
Madrid
discharged a dozen Marines, amongst them, Liao noted, a Kel-Voran. The waist-high reptilian was bristling with weapons. Without counting, Liao could see almost a dozen: plasma weapons, grenades, long tubes that glowed ominously at both ends. At his hip were a pair of double-edged blades, sheathed in leather or hide that was also edged.

Yanmei Cheung, the head of the
Beijing
’s Marine detachment, greeted her with a warm smile. “Evening, Captain.”

“Hanging out on the
Madrid
now?” she asked, curious.

“Actually, yes,” Cheung said. “A cross-training initiative. When the call came in, we were just a few hundred clicks south. Figured we might as well make it a live-fire exercise.”

Liao noticed Hanna Keller amongst the Marines who disembarked and saw how she smiled at the back of Cheung’s head. It was the kind of smile that she had seen on Rowe when she looked at Iraj. Suddenly, Liao didn’t believe that Cheung’s decision was
entirely
pragmatic.

Those crazy kids.

Trying to avoid staring, Liao’s eyes roamed until they fell upon the Kel-Voran. He was sniffing around the area, growling eagerly like a barely restrained animal. Liao slid up to Cheung and lowered her voice so only she could hear. “I can’t believe all of those are training rounds. Is he expecting to fight a war here?”

“Honestly,” said Cheung, “he basically is. He’s got a name although I can’t pronounce it for the life of me, so everyone calls him Stumpy. Strangely, he prefers that. Getting a nickname is kind of a point of honour or something. The guy doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s about death, death, killing, more death. He’s useful to have but not that good at following orders.”

“That’s a problem.”

“We’ll see,” said Cheung. “He’s certainly got the skills we need.”

She left it in Cheung’s hands. “Right,” she said, raising her voice and addressing the Marines present. “Let’s find this debris.”

With no further ado, they left. Stumpy took the lead, sniffing eagerly, a pistol in one hand and a comically oversized sword in the other. He walked, stooped and bent, hunting eagerly. Liao and the others followed him into the gloom.

The ships had landed in a natural clearing with firm ground, but as they got further away from the landing site, the soil underfoot became mud. The smell rose to her nose, rotten and festering, thick with the scent of decay and mud. Liao’s boots slurped as she walked, and soon she was splattered up to her knees with muck.

“This sucks,” bitched one of the Spanish Marines. His accent reminded Liao of de Lugo. She and de Lugo slept together once… a long, long time before. James had taken the revelation with humour. She was lucky to have him, and that thought, odd though it might be as she stood surrounded by rotting vegetation and filth, made her smile.