The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) (15 page)

“No, that’s forbidden. No one would risk their ascension, or anyone else’s, by putting life or health in jeopardy. Why do you ask?”

“We need your help. Will you come to the city with us and help us deactivate the probe—the ancient device?”

Lilith dropped her chin to her chest and turned away from him. “I’m no warrior, not like you. What good will I be?”

“We can handle the fighting, don’t worry about that. We’ll need you to drop the shields on the city if we can’t find an easier way to kill Mentiq,” Yarrow said.

Her head snapped up and she stared at the Marine.

“You’re going to kill Lord Mentiq? What about the rest of the village? The Lan’Xi came to us with the Karigole, and every last one of them were purged for the actions of a few who tried to tell us the truth. They catch me over there…”

“We’ll get you all out. I promise.” Yarrow touched his gloved fingers to her hand.

“Are you going to protect me?”

“You have my word.”

“Then I’ll go.” She stood up and ran her hands over her tunic to smooth it out.

“So do you have a boyfriend?” Yarrow asked nervously.

“A what?”

“Nothing! Let’s get back to the lieutenant before those kadanu show up.” Yarrow pushed against the bench, and his augmented muscles snapped the old planks with a crack. The bench collapsed beneath Yarrow and he fell on his backside.

Yarrow sprang to his feet and dusted himself off, glancing at the wrecked bench.

“I’ll fix that later,” he said.

Orozco moved through a wall of tall ferns, their sway the only sign of his passing so long as his cloak was active. A field of low grass stretched ahead of him in the garnet-hued light from the night sky.

He took a step forward and crushed a puffy mushroom that ejected spores all over him.

“Blast it.” He bent over and tried to brush the dust away.

“You know we’re trying to infiltrate through the island. Using stealth. So as not to be discovered,” Steuben said.

“Yeah, I got that part.” Orozco unsnapped a fern blade and swept it across his legs, knocking more and more spores into the air, which adhered to his armor and gave him a ghostly pallor.

“I wasn’t sure. A Toth menial in Mentiq’s city can probably hear you blundering around out here,” Steuben said.

“How about we keep moving?” Orozco shook out his Gustav and walked across the field. “You see my weapon? You think I care about subtlety? No, give me a line of sight on a pack of Toth warriors and I’ll—”

The ground gave way beneath him and Orozco got off half a shout before he crashed into a thicket of sharpened sticks. He fell against the dusty ground and tried to move. The broken tips of wooden stakes were stuck between the armor joints around his shoulder and waist. He pried the wood out and gave thanks that his armor managed to protect him from the primitive trap.

He looked around and saw a decaying body impaled just above the ground, the stakes running through a skeletal rib cage and skull. The body looked human.

“I’m OK. Steuben? Lafayette? I need some help out. Guys?”

There was no answer.

He heard footsteps approaching and three lithe figures ran up to the edge of the pit. Orozco saw their outline against the nebula sky, all hairless humanoids holding crude weapons.

“Uh…hi.” Orozco waved to them. “You guys are Karigole, right? Know a guy named Steuben?”

One of the figures drew back a bow and shot an arrow. It hit Orozco in the chest and bounced off his armor.

“Really? I’m here to help, believe it or not.”

The sound of clicks and whistles came from the tallest of the three. One of the others picked up a large stone and lifted it over his head. He reared back and hurled it at Orozco, but it stopped in midair just as it left his grasp, dropping to the ground.

Steuben dropped his cloak and the three attackers backed away, brandishing their weapons. Steuben removed his helmet and spoke in the same clicks and whistles. Weapons lowered and one of the three reached out to touch Steuben on the side of his face. The figure looked up at the much taller Steuben, and Orozco saw the face of a younger Karigole.

One of the juveniles turned and ran away.

“Excuse me? Little help here?” Orozco said as he got to his feet. The side of the pit was packed dirt and didn’t look like it could support his weight.

“Here.” Lafayette, de-cloaked but still wearing his helmet, reached into the pit.

Orozco lifted the handle of his Gustav to Lafayette and held on to the weapon as the cyborg easily lifted him from the pit.

Orozco looked over his weapon and brushed dirt away.

Steuben was still talking to the pair of shocked Karigole, who looked young to Orozco’s best guess.

“What’re they saying?” he asked.

Lafayette plucked the voice box off Orozco’s throat guard and plugged a wire into it from his gauntlet. A moment later he passed it back to the gunner.

“—heard stories about the last Centuria, but we never believed it. Just an old geth’aar tale to give us hope,” one of the younger Karigole said.

“How old are you?” Steuben asked. “Have you been through your second passage?”

“I’m twenty turnings. Theol is nineteen. She should have hers before mine but…no one wants the passage anymore,” the Karigole said.

“Why?”

“You should talk to Bishala. She’s our eldest geth’aar, our matriarch. She can explain things fully,” Theol said. She was as tall as the other, and with a slighter build. Both wore ragged cloth crisscrossed over their bodies and bound by cords of rope around their waists.

“Come,” she said and pointed across the field.

Steuben walked between the two Karigole, but Lafayette held back.

As Steuben and the others pulled ahead, Orozco kept pace with Lafayette and asked the Karigole, “Why aren’t you…I don’t know, happy?”

“Karigole society, in whatever manner it has survived here, is different from what I’ve experienced in your culture. There are things I do not expect you to understand,” Lafayette said stiffly.

“Then help me out. I don’t want to do something stupid like insult a household god or have to fight one of you to the death because it’s time to get frisky or something like that,” Orozco said.

“I am dead,” Lafayette said and Orozco stopped in his tracks. “By the geth’aar’s definition, I am too damaged to serve as a parent and must be pushed out of the clan. Our genetic makeup is a bit different from yours. The strength and health of a Karigole parent at the time of conception is passed on to the child. If a Karigole father has a broken arm or some other trauma, the baby may be born with a weakened limb or even lame. The geth’aar do not allow such weakness in the clan.

“By rights, I should have been left to die from my wounds after the Xaros disintegration beam took so much from me. But, the Centuria thought we were the last…an exception was made.”

“They’re not going to like you because you’ve got battle scars?”

“Scars are of little consequence. Damage that could be passed on to a child is another.”

“But you don’t even…” Orozco glanced at Lafayette’s crotch.

“Irrelevant to the geth’aar. They are superstitious and hidebound. It is best not to try to rationalize it. Come, we’re falling behind.” Lafayette started walking again.

“What’s a geth’aar? It isn’t getting translated.” Orozco saw a group of low grass huts in the distance.

“It is our third sex. Your language has no acceptable concept for them so the voice box lets the word through unfiltered,” Lafayette said.

“Third? Are there more?”

“No. Male, female and geth’aar. The geth’aars receive the sperm and ovum from the mother and father, then carry the baby to term. Geth’aar births are very rare, and they have a high status in our culture,” Lafayette said.

Orozco frowned. “If they’re so rare…then how…wait…”

“Our men and women marry and raise the children, but the geth’aar are something of a community asset. Clans form around two or three geth’aar, protect them and care for them, and the geth’aar give birth for the clan,” Lafayette said.

“Huh. And I thought human women were complicated.”

“The geth’aar are often the longest lived of any of us. But if a fertile cycle passes without them becoming pregnant, they run the risk of becoming very ill and dying,” Lafayette said. He stopped in a patch of tall grass at the edge of the village. Children ran out of huts and swarmed around Steuben. Older Karigole, skinny and not as tall as Steuben, formed a cordon around the warrior and the children.

“Hmm, no adults,” Lafayette said.

“What, the tall ones aren’t adults?”

“Karigole children are born neutral, neither male nor female. They become one or the other during their first puberty at roughly ten turnings. They reach sexual maturity once their second passage—or puberty—completes,” Lafayette said.

“Man, they should’ve sent Lowenn or another anthromo-pediatrican whatever on this mission. This is too much for me,” Orozco said. “So what do we do now?”

“You may remove your helmet, but I will keep mine on. It’s better this way.” Lafayette held up his cybernetic hands with five humanlike fingers. “If they ask, tell them I am human and don’t wish to show my face.”

“You don’t think they’ll be glad to see you?”

“Please, Orozco. It is better this way.” Lafayette touched a button on his gauntlet and his visor darkened to the point it was pitch black.

“Fine, whatever. You’re Lafayette, my brother from another mother.” Orozco stepped out of the grass and onto a muddy patch of ground.

“That makes no sense,” Lafayette said.

A light went on within a large round hut, and three Karigole came out of the low doorway, each wearing leather tunics with deep sleeves. Beads and bits of bone hung from thin cords tied to their clothes that rattled and clinked as they walked toward Steuben. These Karigole had hair tied into heavy buns at the back of their heads.

Must be the geth’aar,
Orozco thought.

The lead geth’aar’s skin was an ashen gray, her body heavy with child.

Steuben went to one knee and bowed his head. The geth’aar touched her knuckles to Steuben’s temple and lifted his chin up.

“You are not the last,” she said.

****

Hale sat against a tree and thumbed the magazine release on his rifle. He removed the ammunition from his gauss weapon and looked into the magazine, checking for any sign of dirt or debris in the packed rounds. The cobalt-blue tungsten rounds gleamed in the moonlight. He tapped the magazine against his knee and slapped it back into place.

“Sir?” came from over his shoulder.

Hale looked over and found Rohen standing between two trees, his sniper rifle in his hands.

“You got a minute?” Rohen asked. “Need to talk to you.”

Hale motioned to a patch of pine needles next to him. The sniper knelt on one knee, the butt of his long rifle planted firmly into the ground.

“What’s on your mind?” Hale asked.

“The easiest way for you to understand is for you to say a code phrase into your microphone. You have an encrypted message waiting for you. Just say,” Rohen said, rolling his eyes, “peanut, nostril, happy clam.”

“What? Rohen are you feeling OK? Take a knee and drink some water,” Hale said.

“I didn’t pick the phrase. Please, sir. It’s from Ibarra,” Rohen said.

“Is this some sort of new-guy prank they put you up to? Saying peanut nostril happy clam is not—”

Hale’s gauntlet vibrated violently. A tiny panel flipped open and a projection emitted from a tiny lens.

Ibarra’s head and shoulders appeared between the two Marines.

“Lieutenant Hale,” Ibarra said, “I never did apologize for calling you a knuckle-dragger when you retrieved me from beneath my tower.” Hale had never shared that detail from the longest day in his life with anyone. The only other person who knew about that little insult was Stacey Ibarra, and she was away on Bastion. “Mostly because you are a knuckle-dragger and I’ve never met an infantryman that took offense to that label.

“But let’s get down to brass tacks. Young Mr. Rohen is a proccie, but not your run-of-the-mill kind like Yarrow. See, we recovered one of the overlord’s tanks from the
Naga
wreck on the moon, reverse engineered it with the omnium reactor and found a number of design flaws. Specifically, we can overload the nervous system when it feeds through the tank, killing the overlord. That’s where Rohen comes in.  He was specially designed as a fail-safe for your mission. His mind
burns
, Hale. It’s better that you don’t know the specifics of how we did it, but we designed him as a poison pill for Mentiq, or any overlord that gets a hold of him.”

“No.” Hale pointed a finger at Rohen—who listened to Ibarra’s revelation with the passion of a man getting yesterday’s sports scores—and shook his head. “Absolutely not. I’m not going to send you to—”

“Get Rohen to the Toth,” Ibarra continued. “They’ll take him to Mentiq and then your mission will be accomplished. I know you’re not the kind of leader to blindly send someone to certain death, so let me tell you this: it won’t matter. We had only a few weeks to design Rohen. We would have made him to survive for years and years, but we didn’t have the time to do it right. He’s dying, Hale.”

Rohen nodded, then took out an auto-injector and jabbed it into his neck. He shuddered and clenched his jaw as the medicine took hold.