Heart of Annihilation (14 page)

“Benjamin Rose?” Her tone was sharp and surprised. She did know something! “Of course I know of Benjamin Rose. Now concentrate on the—”

“Wait, that’s it?”

“We don’t have time for this, inmate.”

“Rose. My name is Rose,” I snapped.

Her face was hard. After a moment she blew out a breath and unclenched her jaw. “Rose,” she conceded. “Yes, I know of Benjamin Rose. As far as I know he was last seen on Retha. Now, really—”

“Recently? I mean, when? Did you see him?” I couldn’t keep the excitement from bubbling out.”

The officiate’s eyes hardened. “I have had no contact with Benjamin Rose, and only know him from gossip and rumor.”

“What rumors? Just tell me what you know.”

“No.” Her answer was nonnegotiable.

“But—”

“I said no.” She pressed two fingers to her eyes, took a breath, and then fixed me with a stern stare. “How about this . . . Rose, do your part to get us through this, and I’ll give you what little information I possess.” With that the conversation was over. “Now concentrate. Feel the currents and draw them toward your body.”

“I don’t need a lesson in controlling the electricity in
my
dimension.” The words came out snottier than intended, in a downright bitter wave of malice I should’ve seen coming. The officiate clacked her teeth together.

It actually wasn’t true. I didn’t have the first idea what I was doing. Electrocute a weasely First Lieutenant? Check. Throw a volt out of desperation? Check, check, check. Power a portal?

“Just tell me what to hold so I can charge the stupid thing,” I said. My eyes pricked with frustrated tears and I swiped rainwater from my face to hide them.

“Have it your way. Over here.”

Getting up from the crate required willpower I didn’t know I possessed, and thirty seconds or so to clear the wooziness from my head before I dared take a step. The officiate waited patiently. Once I was successfully standing, she gestured to two coils of metal below the panel that had scanned her hand. Tesla coils? Slinkies, maybe? She said they were using Earth technology. The coils pulsed with a bright blue light, surging a faint ripple through the portal plates. Thick cables ran from the coils, rising to the cables near the top of the tower. On a normal day I could see how it would provide the portal with enough energy to send Rethans across several dimensions.

“So I hold them, or . . . ?”

Officiate Lafe stared at me, unspeaking, her face tight. A flash of movement, a glint of silver, and my left hand was captured between her fingers. I felt a sting on either side of my hand. It didn’t hurt, at least not compared to getting shot, but I yanked my hand away.

“What’d you do that for?”

“Currents flow better through broken skin.”

“Broken like my shoulder?”

“The currents go where you tell them to.”

“No, they won’t.” I held my pierced hand close to my body. The lightning illuminated a small bead of blood on either side. I was imagining all the power escaping through the cannonball sized wound in my shoulder compared to her little pinpricks.

Lafe flipped a sharp silver instrument between fingers. Her lips were thin. “Your injury shouldn’t cause a problem,” she said, reading my mind. “We can deal with that in a moment if you would—”

“Seriously? You have super healing powers? Because I’m not going to lie, that would—”

“If we need to we can use some non-conducting material to fool your body into thinking the only open skin are those points on your hands,” she paused. “I can’t heal your injury. That’s Thirteenth Dimension power.”

“Oh.” The small tremor of hope that I might not die on this Godforsaken, muddy hill washed away as quickly as the rain washed the beads of blood from my hand. I lifted my right hand as far as my injury would allow and Officiate Lafe pricked both sides without apology.

“Place your fists within the coils, and open your hands wide so you are touching as much of the metal as possible. Then simply release the charge within your body through your hands. You can manage that, right?”

“Sure.” I didn’t move. “If you get me that non-whatever-it-is material for my shoulder. You can manage that, right?”

We stared at each other in the pulsing, blue light. If my face looked anything like hers, this was a battle for the record books.

“Just put your hands in the coils,” she finally said, and marched away.

I didn’t watch where she was going, instead dropping to my knees with a sigh. Water saturated the already wet lower half of my pants. An exhausted ache shivered through me.

I needed to grab my right hand with my left to be able to place it into the coil, moronic invalid that I was, before jamming my left hand in the other coil.

Something cold and heavy slapped onto my shoulder. I grunted, raising rain-bleared eyes to Officiate Lafe. She adjusted a bright white swatch of non-conducting fabric and stepped back.

I closed my eyes and tried to wipe away the tension and fear, the debilitating pain and trauma. I tried to distance myself from the booming thunder and the drenching rain and focus on the currents flowing through my body. I was surprised at the masses of electricity I’d accumulated since volting Deputy Hoth. They crackled to life all along my nervous system, racing across the nerves like copper wires. Shivery threads of current made their way at my urging toward my hands. They tried to make a rapid and painful exit through the entrance wound in my shoulder, hardening for a moment where I imagined the bullet was lodged. The electricity pooled against the Rethan fabric, splintering pain into the damaged flesh. I sagged against the tower, my forehead coming to rest against the cold wet metal. I bit my tongue to suppress a whimper.

It was only with extreme concentration that I forced the mass to unravel and work its way down my fingertips. A burst of burning power exploded from my hands in much larger amounts than I thought the tiny pinpricks of broken skin could accommodate.

Once the flow of electricity started the coils drew the energy away, sucking it from my body as neatly as slurping liquid through a straw. A loud, whirring hum pulled me out of my focus. Bright blue light penetrated my eyelids. I fluttered them open, squinting into a dazzling array of zapping energy. Currents bounced in diagonally jerking masses across the opening, going from one plate to another until they created a solid-looking screen of light. The screen brightened at the edges and expanded into a perfect circle.

Through the electrical screen, I could see a landscape so dissimilar in geography to the one on which I knelt that it might as well be a different planet. Everything appeared smooth and solid, made of shining stone or metal—had to be metal, I concluded—and was housed in an enclosed arena of some sort giving no evidence of what might lay beyond.

My limbs trembled. My mind muddied. I collapsed with a watery squelch, and my limp hands slid from the coils. I leaned my shoulder against the leg of the tower, the peel of an orange, every nutritional bit extracted to power the monstrous display of light before me. My lips tingled in an I-need-oxygen sort of way, but I couldn’t seem to get air any farther than the very top of my lungs. A slow and certain suffocation I didn’t have enough energy to prevent. I should’ve given her the coin and taken my chances with her good will.

Officiate Lafe stood over the top of me, her focus on the hand-scanning panel. She didn’t bother to look at me or offer any gesture of appreciation. Her fingers brushed across her reacquired monitor and adjusted something near the panel. I didn’t expect a party or tears of gratitude, but was a murmured thank you too much to ask for? If I’d had even a spark of energy I would have given her a matching scorch mark for her other shoulder.

“That’s it, right?” I asked, hoping.

“Not quite.”

“I charged your portal. What more do you need?”

“I need you to be quiet while I finish this.”

The energy of holding my hands in my lap became too much, and I let them drop to the wet ground. Cool rain hammered on my head. Water drizzled through my hair and ran down my back. The night deepened as the sun set, the storm no longer the only thing making the Sonoran Desert dark. Rethans splashed around with white-booted feet doing their unknown jobs. More seemed to be congregating closer to the portal, speaking to each other in soft, lighting tones. An eerie cacophony.

I would have given anything to be sitting on the back porch at home, eating watermelon with my dad and watching the deer scamper through the back field. The air at home always seemed to be the right temperature, the setting sun giving off a dazzling array of Technicolor brush strokes. We would spit melon seeds across the lawn in a brilliantly pointless battle of aim and distance.

A shudder brought me back to the miserable present. My eyes focused, unfocused, and then unscrambled two figures from the rain. Thurmond and Marshal Rannen walked side by side, speaking to one another like comrades rather than prisoner and warden. Thurmond halted, staring open-mouthed at the portal, and then hurried to catch up with Rannen. Rannen carried an extra-large crate, and he set it down on top of the crate I’d been sitting on earlier.

My camouflage must have been doing a supreme job, because without so much as a glance in my direction Rannen unlatched the lid of the crate, and Thurmond helped him lift the lid to the ground. The brilliant light from the portal illuminated rain-spattered variations of the unusual snakelike weapons with which the Rethans had threatened us. Most were small, the ones that wrapped around your wrist and fit into the palm of your hand. Several others were only slightly smaller than my own M-16, but looked more like a twisting coil of white stone than an actual weapon.

“What’s the range on these smaller ones?” Thurmond asked. He glanced uncomfortably over his shoulder at the portal. The light turned his face pasty.

“On Retha it depends on the amount of electricity you can draw from your body, but on Earth we need to depend on the temporary charge.” Rannen picked up a weapon, “See, here’s the charge indicator. This charge is nearly gone, but you could still get up to a hundred meters for a stunning shot. Fifty meters if you want to kill.”

“Only one shot?”

“For this one yes, but look here. This one has a higher charge. If you leave it on stun, and keep the shot close, you should be able to get as many as five shots. This one,” he held up the longer weapon. “No, you’d get only a single shot with this one.”

“I get it,” Thurmond said. The weapons rattled against each other as human and Rethan sorted through them. “How many do you have? Is this it?”

Rannen nodded. “And the majority of them aren’t even charged. You can thank Hoth for that—him and his target practice all week. Rethans are, for the most part, noncombatants, so our company has little or no training in the use of arms. Hoth is considered our weapons expert.”

“We need to set up some ambush locations at the south of the camp.” Thurmond gestured in the general direction he meant. “Rannen, why don’t you grab Hoth and anyone else who can fire one of these things.”

“I think Deputy Boderick might be able to give us a hand.”

I thought the little guy was more likely to collapse in a dead faint than shoot someone. The sorting of the weapons, the tactical manner of speaking as these Rethans—these aliens—planned to stun and kill human beings, felt suddenly wrong. Never mind that said humans had already tried to kill me. Never mind that they were descending in an unprovoked attack. We would be fighting humans. Humans wearing the uniform that sported the stars and stripes. Justet told me aliens were here to overrun Earth. Unreliable or no, what if it was true? As a citizen and a patriot of Earth, I felt a duty to ask before committing treason.

“Hey, uh, Rannen?” My voice barely made it past my throat manifested by the fact that neither of them turned around. I tried again, louder this time. “Rannen?”

They both looked up and around, squinting into the portal, before their eyes finally found me.

“Oh, crap. Rose!” Thurmond was over to me in two brisk strides. He squatted and chafed my hand between his to return the nonexistent warmth. “You look like hell.” He pressed his lips together, examining my face. “But still pretty human-looking.”

Rannen approached. The officiate stepped aside, calling for Boderick like she’d been about to do that anyway.

“Rannen,” I said again.

“What is it, Kris?” Rannen shuffled one of the larger weapons from his left hand to his right and back.

“You,” I swallowed. “You guys aren’t here to take us over, are you?”

“I’m sorry, what?” Rannen’s head cocked. A tilt of his lips.

“One of the soldiers told me y-you guys were aliens, come to take over our planet.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Rannen said. Creases of laughter circled his eyes.

It had sounded much better in my head. I persisted. “So what are you doing here?”

“The officiate and I had some private business to attend to, but otherwise we’re wardens doing our yearly check of the inmate population.”

“Oh.”

The Rethans were lining up near the portal now, whispering and crowding together. Wardens on peaceful terms with our government. Innocent people—even if they were aliens.

“T, wha-time’s it?”

He snapped a look at his watch. “Twenty-oh-eight. You done?”

“No.” Water dripped into my eyes. My body shuddered in misery. I rotated my jaw in an attempt to get the words to come out better. “Officiate says she needs me . . . but won’-say why.”

Marshal Rannen’s silver-white eyebrows dripped water onto his cheeks. “The portal is supposed to be powered constantly, and can only hold a certain amount of charge with the kind of power you’re giving it.” I sensed his irritation was not directed at me. “It will need another charge or two to be able to get everyone through.”

“Ah.” The bitter realization settled deep in my chest. I let out a bark of mirthless laughter. “I guess I ought to go
recharge
myself then.”

Rannen glanced at the officiate working a few feet away and then said softly, “Why don’t you just give her the dimensional catapult?”

I shrugged. “Why aren’t you making me?”

Rannen’s face went blank, and he didn’t respond. Thurmond studied me, his jaw muscles taut. I stared back, trying to look strong and in control of myself. After a moment he addressed Rannen.

“You have any more of that serum?”

“No!” Water sprayed from my lips. “No way!”

Thurmond ignored me. “Rannen?”

“Thurmond,” I pleaded. “Didn’t you see what it did to me?”

“Yeah. I saw you could walk around and get out more than two words without sounding like an eighty-year-old smoker.”

“And I almost volted . . . I was . . . I—”

“Rose.” Thurmond rubbed water from my cheek with his thumb. “You charge that portal again in your current state, and it’ll kill you. I don’t understand what weird attachment you have to that coin thing, but you’re going to have to pick between the coin and the serum.”