Trial by Fire - eARC (77 page)

But she was dead.

* * *

Trevor looked at Opal, at Caine kneeling, back to him, the rain hammering his soaked shirt flat against him. And all he could think was:

You never deserved her.
It was bullshit—pure, irrational bullshit—to think that, to feel that. But that was all he could think or feel.

“Trevor. Here, mate. Look who I found!”

It was Tygg’s voice, speaking to him from the end of some long tunnel.

Trevor turned, saw Tygg, whose ready smile seemed to shoot off his face sideways, all at once, as if slapped out of existence. “Trev, what is it? What’s happ—?”

And then another face was in front of Tygg’s. He thought he might be hallucinating, but then he saw that this face was just as rainsoaked, as tired, as his own. “Elena.” He didn’t think to say it, but he heard his voice make those sounds.

She looked at him, then over toward Caine and the body, and back to him. She closed her eyes, turned away.

“Sir”—it was Winfield, now—“we’ve got things under control. We—that is, Commander Ayala and your sister—linked up with Lieutenant Tygg in the first courtyard and got the drop on the Sloths that were working their way behind you. I think we’ve pretty much secured this part of the compound.”

“Good.”

Trevor felt Elena’s hand rest gently on his shoulder. He wished he didn’t need it, was glad she had placed it there, wished it was his father’s.

Winfield didn’t stop. “Rulaine went back with Cruz to reorganize the insurgents, assign some new leaders to replace the ones we lost. Where’s Stosh?”

“Back in the shed.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Nothing. He’s dead.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

Presidential Palace, Jakarta, Earth

Darzhee Kut watched as the human called Wu rose, apparently receiving a call from his superiors. As soon as he had moved out of ready earshot, Hu’urs Khraam spoke weakly. “Darzhee Kut, come closer. I cannot see you.

“I am here, Hu’urs Khraam. Here is the claw of your rock-son.”

“Would you had been. No matter. This day, you are. Is Urzueth Ragh there as well?”

“I am, Esteemed Hu’urs Khraam.”

“Then bear witness to what I decree. Darzhee Kut, I name you Delegate Pro Tem, plenipotentiary in regard to our presence in this system. It is to be explicitly understood that this confers authority over the fleet as well, just as I possess. Urzueth Ragh, forgive me for not naming you to this responsibility, but at this hour, the song we need is that of a diplomat, not an administrator.”

“I harmonize, Esteemed Hu’urs Khraam.” Darzhee thought that he had never seen Urzueth Ragh look so nervous, or relieved, in all the years he had known him.

“Darzhee Kut, it falls to you to perform the final task we must perform.” The old Arat Kur was silent.

“Esteemed Hu’urs Khraam, I do not know the task to which you refer.”

“Do you not? Darzhee, they—the humans—they must never learn what we know of them. They must never learn it of themselves. This is a mercy to both our races.”

“But Hu’urs Khraam, when you surrendered our ships, surely you understood they could not help but learn. They would go through our computers, our records, and they would discover that—”

“And that is why you must give the order, the Final Directive, that will protect the secrets kept in the deep caves of the Homenest, Darzhee Kut. And you must remind your rock-siblings what the Wholenest needs of them in this dark hour.”

“Hu’urs Khraam, I cannot do this.”

“Darzhee Kut, you must. You
must
—and it is late. My father sings; I have not heard him for so long. I know the harmony. It is a minor—”

Hu’urs Khraam breathed in sharply. The breath escaped slowly, as it will from a corpse.

Darzhee Kut looked up at Urzueth Ragh. “He could not mean it, rock-sibling.”

“Certainly he did, rock-sibling.”

“But our promise to surrender to the humans, and all the lives of our own—”

“Rock-sibling, Darzhee Kut. They matter not. The fleet must be destroyed.”

Presidential Palace compound, Jakarta, Earth

Caine looked up from Opal’s bone-white face, turned to look for people he knew—for Trevor in particular—but he was surrounded by insurgents, some Australian commandoes, some very short Chinese soldiers.
So where is everyone I know? Are they all dead? Who are these people? How long have I been here, with her?

He saw the garden shed, remembered it: maybe, with the rain coming down, Trevor and the others had gone back in there. Caine rose, remembered his weapon, reached down slowly, lifted its strap over his shoulder. He let his feet take him to the shed and through the doorway he had sprinted out of to try to save her life ten minutes or ten hours or ten days ago.

The only person he saw was Stosh. Dead Stosh, with his tongue protruding slightly from his faintly smiling lips and a hole where the base of his neck had been. There was no light except for the dark gray haze that came from skies heavy with clouds and smoke. Rain drummed on the tin roof and he went to look out the back door.

“Caine.”

It was a strangely familiar voice. He turned, saw Elena sitting on a gardener’s stool, behind one of the empty oil drums.

“Elena.” She usually made him feel nervous, excited, perplexed—but now, he could not feel anything. Would have felt guilty, had he felt anything. “Elena,” he said again.

She rose and approached him slowly, the way people do with stray animals that might either bolt or attack. When she got next to him, she squatted down.

For a long time they were silent, looking at the floor, then each other, then out the door. Out the door where Opal’s body lay unseen, hidden from view by the doorframe. To Caine, it felt like that corpse was stretched across the packed dirt between him and Elena.

Whose knotted hands clenched as she exhaled forcefully. “Caine, I don’t know what to do, what to say. I shouldn’t
say
anything, not here, not now. But—”

Caine nodded. “But we might not be alive in five minutes.” He looked up as a flight of missiles roared overhead, fell and blasted in the city south of them.

She closed her eyes, looked away, nodded. “Whatever we don’t say now might never get said. And it’s not just about us. If only one of us lives, gets back to Connor—”

Caine matched her nod, looked down at his blood-stained hands. There was no good place to start, so he began with the question that had puzzled him the most. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier—on Mars, or at the Convocation—about us? About how we fell in love on the Moon?”

She kept looking past the torn doorway into the rain. It was a long time before she spoke. “How could I? By the time they woke you, brought you back after thirteen years and reintroduced you at Parthenon, you were already involved with—with Opal. And I didn’t know how or if to approach you at all, because I had never been able to find out why you disappeared, what had really happened to you. So after Parthenon and Dad’s death, I searched to see if there was any new information about where you’d been up until then. But I didn’t want to push too hard, since it was pretty mysterious, the way you had just popped back into the world again. And the lack of information told me that my suspicion about why you disappeared fourteen years ago was correct. It wasn’t because you had fled from me, from us. No. Something had happened to you. Something strange, dangerous.”

“What do you mean?”

“Caine, you were a writer and analyst who had left a well-marked trail. Which came to a sudden and abrupt end the same day you didn’t show up for dinner and the rest of our life together. By the time I recovered from that and started trying to find out more about you and what you were doing, I discovered that most of the data was no longer available. And what information still existed about you was suspiciously general. It was as if someone had conducted a thorough campaign to profoundly diminish any trace of you, but without erasing all record of your existence. Probably because complete erasure would have attracted attention all by itself.

“And who was I to attempt to learn about you from people you knew personally? I wasn’t family, I had no rights. Our relationship was so sudden and so short, that you had probably never mentioned me to anyone. And given who
I
was, I could hardly make those inquiries without attracting all the wrong kind of attention.”

Caine agreed with a slow, shallow nod. “Because you figured that if someone had erased so much about me, they’d be watching for anyone who came looking for that lost data.”

“Exactly. And what if one of those watchers learned that it was Nolan Corcoran’s daughter who had come looking? If you were alive somewhere, that was the kind of connection which could have endangered not only my father, and me, and you, but Connor.”

Connor.
Caine closed his eyes. “Does Connor know?”

“That you’re his father? No.”

“What have you told him?”

“That I met a man who I loved, but couldn’t remain with. I couldn’t say more than that for the same reason I couldn’t ask too many questions about your disappearance. It was too full of dangerous unknowns.”

Caine put out his hand toward Elena. She took it slowly. “There are so many other things to say, to ask,” he said hoarsely. “But today is…” His hand and his voice fell away as his eyes slipped back toward the front door, out toward the dying rain.

“I know,” Elena said, “I know. But after today, we’ll have time. All the time we need.”

Presidential Palace, Jakarta, Earth

Darzhee Kut closed with Urzueth to keep his words down to a faint chittering. “We must not destroy the fleet. If we use the devices of the Final Directive—either the ones in our ships, or those in our bodies—it will trigger the very apocalypse they were meant to prevent.”

“Darzhee Kut, granted that Hu’urs Khraam made you Delegate Pro Tem with his dying breath—but you have slipped into sun-time?”

“No. I see with well-shaded eyes, Urzueth Ragh. Think of what our Final Directive means. We are convinced that the humans must not be allowed to learn what we know of their past, their proclivities. They must not discover that we broke the Twenty-first Accord and invaded their homeworld not to correct a border dispute, but to arrest their species’ growth, to preempt their ability to lay waste to our Homenest—again. If we now use the Final Directive, the humans will be confronted by a mystery. That we had obviously planned, from the outset, to destroy even ourselves to deny them any access to our technology, our culture, but most especially, our history. It is wrong—terribly, perfectly wrong—to believe that such an act of self-destruction will bring greater safety to the Wholenest. Do you not see the danger, the greater danger, that will arise if we carry it out?”

Urzueth Ragh seemed ready to reject the line of reasoning, then stopped. Darzhee Kut could feel him thinking, expanding the game board of the scenario, opening areas in which he had not yet thought to play. Darzhee Kut felt and saw him make the fateful move to full comprehension. “Ah. They will not rest until they have solved the mystery. And so they will find out about their past, anyway. Perhaps more surely.”

“Precisely. Some of them, such as Riordan, have come to know us and our behavior well enough to rightly expect that we might, under the current circumstances, peacefully and tractably surrender, and that we are not intrinsically deceitful. But if we carry out the Final Directive, they will have an act that sharply contradicts both those expectations, and in which hundreds of them will die along with us.”

Urzueth hummed agreement. “Which will only amplify the rage they feel over our sneak attack upon their homeworld. They will think us a race of oath-breakers and will thus feel justified in doing whatever they will and can to our kind.”

“All too likely. But worse, there will be the few, the thinking few, who will not react as the many, but will instead curl into their shells of reflection and wonder. Why did the Arat Kur do these things? Why did they attack us by surprise? Why were they willing to break the Twenty-first Accord and so attract the wrath of the Dornaani? How were they ready to destroy themselves in such complete unison when they were defeated? And why did they have suicide cysts where we could not readily find them?”

“That presumes they will know to look for the suicide cysts.”

“But they are sure to do so, Urzueth. How could we effect such widespread self-destruction without them? And once they have discovered the cysts, they will have a mystery so profound that defies any reasonable explanation. The humans might hum to themselves that they can conceive of reasons for why we broke the Twenty-first Accord and attacked. They can even understand why
individuals
of our species might choose suicide over the possibility of abuse, even torture, on a lost battlefield. But premeditated, simultaneous, and universal self-destruction? And with no radios to coordinate it? And even among those of us for whom surrender will, in all probability, be safe?”

Urzueth Ragh buzzed slowly, meditatively. “They will see the preparation, and so discern that we had determined from the beginning that, if we were defeated, we needed to conceal something from them—even at the expense of all our lives and equipment.

Darzhee Kut bobbed. “Just so. They will eventually debrief survivors here or elsewhere who could reveal what we must now keep hidden. For if the humans learn that we knew of them in prior millennia, when their birthright was to burrow the dark between the suns just as we did…”

“…then they will ask why their legacy did not stay among those stars.” Urzueth clicked his mandibles. “Whereas if we do
not
employ the Final Directive, then they will have no reason to ask such questions.”

Darzhee Kut harmonized. “If our actions fit what they expect, they will be without impetus to seek for the unexpected in us. Our resignation to surrender and negotiation will fulfill that expectation. Conversely, our self-destruction would be a goad to them, a deed that they will seek to understand, and in so doing, almost certainly learn the full truth of their past. Under the present circumstances, they could easily become
more
dangerous than we imagined. They will see themselves as the one silently, secretly oppressed species among the stars, long kept from knowledge of themselves, and now invaded to preempt the resumption of their birthright. Like nestlings just discovering the idea of justice and having it violated, how will they act? What will they do to oath-breakers and skulkers such as us?”