Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (9 page)

“Out the way you came. I’ll send word to let you go.”

Andreus wasn’t going to escort him out. Cameron was on his own. He’d surrendered his information, and now had to trust the man at his word. Soldiers outside the study might knife him in the belly the second he stepped into the foyer, but somehow Cameron doubted it. The Andreus Republic was the main reason few people tried to cross the outlands in this area, and there were still severed heads on pikes near the headquarters. But that was the work of zealous worker bees, not the man himself. And as frightening as the cabal was, everything Cameron had heard said it valued honor above all.

Not because Nathan himself was sentimental, Cameron thought, but because honor was an excellent way to maintain loyalty and control.

Something struck Cameron at the door. He turned to Andreus.

“Don’t blame the rebels,” he said.

“Blame them for what?”

“For hiding your wife and daughter. When you go in … keep in mind that they were only trying to keep people safe — ”

“I’m not going in,” Andreus interrupted.

“Why not?”

“They don’t want to see me. They ran away. I won’t break into that camp and drag them back here. They’re always welcome if they choose to come to me on their own, but I won’t force myself on them. For now, it’s enough to know they’re safe.”

He watched the man’s stern face for a long moment, but apparently their conversation was over.

Cameron left the room, realizing he’d somehow managed to get what he came for without giving Nathan Andreus anything other than peace of mind.

Maybe there was hope in the world after all.

C
HAPTER
10

Trevor was out the door before he realized that Christopher seemed to have forgotten all about him, and that Trevor’s summons from Lila’s room had them running in the first place.

“Christopher!” he shouted.

Christopher paused long enough to let Trevor catch him, and they both ran toward the estate’s front gates. Trevor wasn’t in uniform, but that was okay; his was more ceremonial than anything, seeing as he was family more than Guard. More like a protégé to his father than Christopher’s boss — though if push came to shove, Trevor was probably both, technically speaking.

They ran through the gates and into the strangely perfect city streets. Everything was pristine and square without being precisely nice, in contrast to the Apex pyramid’s useless extravagance. The city’s buildings had the look of better-than-average barracks — but barracks nonetheless.

Trevor had a hard time imagining the place as it had been beneath the footprint of Heaven’s Veil after the ground leveling and slight terraforming, but he thought they might be running near the old location of his father’s Axis Mundi — the home they’d all once thought was just a home. If so, the barrack-like homes and small, almost-businesses were an upgrade: hippie tents replaced by socialist bunks. Nobody had to pay their way inside Heaven’s Veil, but many tried to make a living anyway.
The American spirit hard at work,
Trevor’s father sometimes said with what always sounded like a politician’s falsely positive voice. His mother had a different interpretation.
Assholes will be assholes,
she said.

Trevor and Christopher ran side by side, making their way through the streets toward the precinct. Christopher was part of the Apex Guard, and Trevor was son of the viceroy, but the city’s human nexus of authority was still the precinct five blocks up. They could simply call in, but neither wanted to receive assignments and shatter the illusion that they were masters of their own fate.

So they ran. And as they did, Trevor felt like he was using his legs to burn worry.

Things had happened one-two back at the house: Trevor’s curiosity about Piper followed by the sounds of outside activity, as if someone were searching. The pair of events, side by side, made Trevor uneasy.

Purring Reptar patrols filled the air, making Trevor’s skin crawl. He forced himself forward, seeing black flashes as the beasts passed intersections, making their horrible sounds. The things acted like animals (huge, shambling timberwolves or cats perhaps, moving like insects), but Trevor tried to remind himself that they were supposedly every bit as intelligent as the Titans or even the rumored Divinity class.

But that, Trevor supposed, was why they were used as peacekeepers in the city. Nothing kept the peace quite like terror.

They arrived at a precinct in chaos. A dozen human city police jockeyed with an equal number of Reptars for the same positions. The precinct only had the one main set of double doors — if the action was inside, they’d bottleneck in confusion. Reptars were supposed to stay out of the precinct. Human and Astral patrols were supposed to do their jobs to the same technical ends, but cops didn’t like the alien creatures any more than the Reptars seemed to care for them.

As Christopher and Trevor neared the precinct, they saw the bottleneck’s heart. Cops and Reptars weren’t shoving to get inside after all.
Nobody
was getting inside because there was a black man with arms as large as a Titan’s at the double doors, his hands raised and a no-bullshit tenor in his voice: Malcolm Jons, captain of the Heaven’s Veil police force.

“Get out of here, goddammit!” He shooed the enormous, crawling peacekeepers like obnoxious houseflies. “Go back to your fucking posts, and let us handle this!”

One of the creatures lunged toward Jons — the equivalent of an attempted tackle, if the Reptar had been a person. Jons punched the thing in the side of its yawning jaw. He seemed to realize his error immediately and stepped back as the Reptar bellowed its hollow, purring breath and took another pace forward. Then it fell back, apparently chastised.

“You hear me?” Jons yelled, emboldened. “This is a human precinct! You want to take it, then fucking take it, and be done with it all! Go ahead! You want to vaporize my ass and stop pretending we have anything to do with this city’s protection? Do it!”

Several of the massive black Reptars — each the size of a midsize car — prickled at the offer. For a few seconds, Trevor thought the encounter would end in death, but one of the Reptars backed up instead, swishing its head with irritation. It must have sent a psychic command to the others. Soon, they all turned and pawed their way out in an expanding circle, moving away from the building. The human police swiveled away to let the things pass.

Trevor and Christopher did the same as one of the Reptars came directly at them. It paused to assess Trevor. He felt his heart leap into his throat. Its eyes were like a giant serpent’s. It blinked as it took him in, dual sets of eyelids fluttering as the irises underneath shifted from yellow to red to blue to a dazzling emerald green.

“Hey,” said Trevor, watching it, trying to see it as the intelligent being they supposedly were. But he couldn’t get through the single syllable without swallowing, his hand subconsciously raised in surrender.

Unbidden, he felt a thought forced into his mind. This was the way the Reptars “spoke,” such as they ever did. To Trevor, who’d felt it a few times before, the sensation was intrusive, like having a blade’s tip pressed not just to his neck, but through its meat.

The thought came as a series of three bursting images, each lasting a fraction of a second but visible in full detail: a dark place with half walls wet with moisture, a man with black pits for eyes and a ring around his head like a halo, a woman (not Piper) draped in shadow who’d been bisected down the middle and yet remained alive. Trevor got a heavy sense of
settling
to accompany the blast of images, as if something enormous had sighed its weight upon him.

Then the thing flicked its head away, trailing that guttural, rattling growl they all made while stalking their rounds. The creature was through with him, its cryptic message conveyed.

The precinct’s courtyard drained, becoming just another building surrounded by milling humans. Christopher turned to Trevor.

“What did it say?”

Trevor shook his head, trying to clear it. He closed his eyes, inhaled, then let the breath escape.

“No clue. I
hate
when they do that. I think I’d rather it bit me.”

“Watch what you wish for, bro,” Christopher said.

“You all,” bellowed Malcolm Jons in front of the doors, waving at the baffled-looking officers. “Get in here. You stay outside wobbling around like you just got your dicks kicked, you make us look like assholes. Except you, Garcia and Niles. You don’t look like you got your dicks kicked, but only because you don’t have ‘em.” His eyes lit on Trevor and Christopher, still near the small group’s back. He nodded to another officer to keep shooing the others inside and walked over.

“What are you two doing here?” Jons asked Christopher with his fathoms-deep voice. “There wasn’t a general alarm.”

“We heard it start to happen,” said Trevor. “Ran down to see what we could see.”

“No offense, son,” Jons said, “but I don’t need any help. We’re still cops.”

“There was one of those things on viceroy’s property.” Christopher nodded toward the departed Reptars.

Jons’s large jaw worked, considering. “You’re Apex Guard. I suppose you should have been alerted anyway.
They
were, after all.” He nodded toward the absent peacekeepers.

“Alerted to what?”

“There was some sort of security breach. Looks like it was in the house itself.”

“What kind of security breach?”

“No idea. But we’re already on alert, and now there’s this blast of instructions to fan out and await further orders.”

“Await further orders on what?”

“Fuck if I know, Christopher! I’m just some gumshoe motherfucker who
pretends
to be in charge of keeping order around here. I’m sure
they
know exactly what they’re after, but we’re on a need-to-know basis.” The big cop affected a servile voice. “Yes, sir, tell us what to do, Mr. Alien Overlord!”

“So what was all this? Why did they come to the precinct?” Christopher gestured at the courtyard. The situation had been quickly devolving before Jons flushed the Reptars — or until they’d been called back.

“It’s a computer thing. The city backups are here.”

“Here?”
Trevor looked at Christopher. “I thought Raj kept that stuff up on the — ”

“Our
backups,” Jons clarified. “One of the downsides of the Astrals letting us get about our business is that we have our own brains and don’t always play it exactly as they would. But until they want to drop the act and wipe us out, then yes, we still have our own records. Surveillance plus a hard backup of the local network.”

“They don’t have access to our network without you letting them in?” Trevor asked.

“Oh, sure they do. That’s where they’re off to now, I’m sure. Or maybe they don’t need to actually
go
anywhere. They just talk right on up to the ships or the shuttle or whatever the fuck with their scary ESP — or, hell, just rape it right out of our minds with their magnet rocks, I don’t know. But that’s my whole point. That’s why it’s so fucking obnoxious, the way their first reaction was to come here. ‘Hey, it’s just the humans. It’s just their only fucking farce of privacy. The one fucking place they pretend to actually be doing anything.’ But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to open the doors and let some spider panther things paw around my files. Shit, like they could even use a touch screen or a keyboard!”

Trevor wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a joke, so he kept his mouth shut.

“Anything we can do?” Trevor asked.

Jons gave Trevor a patronizing look. He wasn’t trying to be disrespectful, but Trevor felt it just the same. Kid of privilege, good only by virtue of sharing half his famous father’s genetic code. Maybe not even then. “I’m sure we can handle it,” he said.

“But a security breach involving the house … ” Christopher trailed off.

“Well, sure Apex Guard would have to be involved.” Jons deferred to Christopher’s position as quickly as he’d dismissed Trevor’s. But that wasn’t fair — Trevor had been the one to come over earlier about all of this, to inform Jons that his father wanted to double the peacemaker presence. Although now that he thought about it, Trevor realized that was maybe why Jons didn’t want to talk to him, or hear what he had to say. There would always be power struggles, and the debate between those who made public proclamations (Trevor’s father) and those who had to live with and enforce the consequences (the human police force) was one of the oldest among them.

“Trevor’s part of my team,” Christopher said.

For a half second, Jons looked like he’d bitten into a lemon. Then he reluctantly softened, and Trevor throttled his gut reaction: It wasn’t Trevor who was on Christopher’s team; Christopher was on Trevor’s. He let it go. They were all ultimately on the same team — Team Humanity, which was supposed to oppose any ill intentions by Team Astrals — but played along because it was easier.

“All right. Look. Like I said, I don’t really know anything other than there’s some sort of problem they care about, which means it’s not a bar brawl. They let us handle human on human, even if it’s a riot. If the cats are all worked up, I’d guess it’s something on the order of an info leak. Gun to head, if I
really
had to guess, my gut says they’ve got ideas about an insider helping with the recent attack. Whatever it was centers around or in the viceroy’s mansion, so I’m sure we’ll need your eyes. But right now, I don’t know what to tell you, other than hang tight.”