Valley of Fires: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) (3 page)

“It gets better, doesn’t it?” Olive asked. “When you’re closer to them?”

For all the connection Mira now shared with the Assembly, she still knew very little about them. One thing she did know, was that Ambassador and his followers had made a very difficult decision. The aliens were a race that, for eons, lived within a joint consciousness, where each one’s emotions and thoughts were instantly accessible to all the others at any time. When they rebelled and joined the quest to rescue Zoey, those connections were severed. Permanently. The staggering silence and blackness which came was, to them, terrifying.

But the aliens soon discovered they had one thing they could latch onto to restore a semblance of their original existence: Mira herself.

The ability to communicate with them, given to her right before Zoey was taken, had unwittingly made her a conduit of sorts for them to sense one another. It was a dim likeness to how it had once been, but it was something, and the closer Mira was to them, the more they could sense each other, and the more their anxiety and sadness lessened.

More and more Assembly rebels appeared every week, leaving their established clans and joining Ambassador’s group, and the sensations grew stronger as they added their emotions to the rest. Mira shuddered thinking about it. What would it be like in a week or a month, if the numbers kept growing? How could she stay sane, with all those emotions washing out her own?

These were the kinds of things she told no one, and so she did what she usually did when questions like Olive’s came up. She lied. “I’m not sure.”

Olive frowned. “You don’t have to tell me, but I hope you’re telling Holt. It’s not good carrying weight like that all by yourself.”

Mira forced herself to smile, then attempted a subject change. “Why aren’t you at the test firing?”

Olive knew when she was being deflected, but she answered all the same. “Nothing there I wanna see.”

Mira could hear the distaste in her voice. “You don’t approve of the Grand Bargain?”

“Not when it means I have to put my crew and my ship in harm’s way.”

“You do that every day.”

“Not by requirement, and not when there’s no profit in it. Fighting wars isn’t what Wind Traders are supposed to do.”

Mira looked at Olive evenly. “How do you know?”

Olive’s eyes thinned. “I’m sure your little friend is very important to you, and I don’t pretend to understand all you’ve been through, but did you
really
stop to think about the ramifications of dragging other people into this? Where they might be killed? By the
hundreds
? Have you thought about how that’s gonna feel when all’s said and done?”

“No,” Mira replied instantly. She and Holt had intentionally
not
thought about those things. If they had, they might have hesitated, they might have done nothing.

“I didn’t think so.” Olive looked back ahead, and Mira didn’t say anything else. Olive was implying the selfishness of Mira’s actions and maybe she was right, but Zoey had come to mean everything to her, and whatever it took to get her back she would do.

Mira sighed. All she really wanted was to be alone with Holt. Their deal with the Wind Traders was almost finished. Tomorrow or the next day they would leave and go their separate directions for who knew how long, and there was no real guarantee they would ever see each other again. What time they had was precious now, and there was far too little of it left.

The Shipyards were just ahead, close enough to make out detail: a honeycombed collection of platforms and scaffolding that surrounded what was left of an old power station, its dual brick smokestacks stretching into the air. Smoke vented from them, but these days it was from the forges and welding stations inside for fabricating and repairing the many Landships which passed through it every year.

She could feel the projections from the Assembly there, out of sight on the other side of the building.

Guardian,
they projected.
There is disagreement.

Now
that
was an understatement, Mira thought.

*   *   *

THE ARGUMENT WAS LOUD
and volatile, but Mira’s attention was held by the Reflection Box. It lay near the entrance to the Forge, the machine shop inside the old power plant, a large, black box with two heavy doors, side by side, that served as its lid. It was painted in worn-out colors of red and green and gold leaf that twisted around its edges, a faded white rabbit on one end, holding a wand that shot sparks in an arc of old silver paint. Large, flamboyant letters spelled out a flowing script of words:

The Mysterious, Magnificent, MOLOTOV—Prepare for Amazement!

In the World Before it had been part of a magician’s repertoire, a magic case that did who knows what. Now, it was one of the most powerful major artifacts ever produced by the Strange Lands. More than that, it was integral to everything that was happening. Not just the Grand Bargain they made here, but the entire endeavor to save Zoey. She thought of Gideon, the former leader of the White Helix, how he had told her it would become important later, how he had bargained with Tiberius Marseilles and the Menagerie to attain it. He had been right, after all.

As she watched, a White Helix Adzer opened one of the box’s heavy doors. Another placed a green Antimatter crystal inside the open compartment lined with soft, red felt cushions, but unlike the crystals she had grown used to, this one was huge, maybe three feet in diameter. It was meant to be fired from the new Landship cannons, and it was the only reason the fragile agreement with the Wind Traders existed at all.

The Adzer shut the door of the box. A second passed, then it was as if the light around her dimmed … and the box flashed. A loud boom, like a thunderclap, shook the foundation of the old building. No one nearby even flinched. It was funny, Mira thought, what you could get used to.

The Adzers opened both lids of the box … and lifted out
two
identical, green Antimatter crystal shells. Mira smiled. The Reflection Box replicated anything put inside it, and the box allowed them to produce, at a rapid pace, what would normally have taken months or even years.

“Just give the word,” a tense, yet zealous voice stated.

Mira was in the Shipyard’s salvage repository, a giant junkyard of pieces and parts the Wind Traders constantly acquired in order to build their massive ships. Airplanes, cars and vans, construction equipment, passenger trains, semitrucks. There was a lumberyard too, full of planks of all kinds of wood, and it was smoking from a fire that had engulfed it. There were no flames now, but the damage was apparent, and it looked like something had exploded. To make matters worse, lying in front of it was the crippled, unmoving form of a large Assembly Brute, one of the five-legged, shielded-ramming machines, the same kind Ambassador inhabited.

In front of her was a large, angry gathering. Wind Trader engineers stood between two other groups that couldn’t have been more different. About a dozen White Helix, dressed in their usual patterns of black and gray, utility belts crisscrossing their torsos. Their Lancets were loose and some of them had their masks pulled up. It was a bad sign, it meant they were ready to fight.

In the empty grass behind the junkyard, the Assembly encampment sat. There were no tents or buildings, of course, just the walkers and an array of Osprey dropships. There were four-legged Mantises and giant, towering, eight-legged Spiders, both from the blue and whites, a clan Ambassador called Mas’Shinra. What was left of the green and orange Mas’Erinhah, the smaller, quick three-legged Hunters with their cloaking abilities and a few of their powerful artillery walkers. More Brutes, like the crumpled one near the lumber, the five-legged walkers of the purple clan. And all of them bore one thing in common: their colors were gone, stripped away, leaving only bright, gleaming silver metal. A line of the walkers, mostly Hunters and Mantises, stood in front of the angry, yelling kids.

Guardian,
a projection came. It was what the Assembly called her, a reference to her perceived role as the protector of Zoey, their Scion, and every time Mira heard it, she felt a sting. It was an ironic reminder of just how badly she had failed in that task, not all that long ago. She ignored the projections, listening to the argument.

“You saw the explosion,” a White Helix stated, a girl, her mask still undrawn. She was tall, lithe, and agile like all Helix, and kept her hair razored in a thin layer of what probably would have been the whitest blond Mira had ever seen, had it been allowed to grow.

“And what was left of one of those Brutes is on the ground right next to it,” said another, staring heatedly at a tall boy in grimy overalls. “What else would it have been?”

“Personally, my money’s on
you,
” the kid replied, folding his arms. Mira knew him. His name was Christian, one of the Wind Trader engineers.

“
Us?
” The Helix seemed aghast.

“Just give the word,” one of the Helix stated again.

“You guys are flipping around in here every day, shooting off those sticks,” Christian stated. “You said yourself you don’t have much to do with artifacts. Which means you have no real idea what happens when one of those crystals comes into contact with—”

“You’re really reaching,” the Helix girl said. “Why are you so eager to protect them?”

“Just. Give. The word.”

Guardian.

What?
Mira thought back, her eyes moving to their source, a five-legged walker standing out front of the others. There were no discerning marks or technology on Ambassador to tell it apart from the others, but still she knew. It was in the projections themselves, they were unique in ways she couldn’t describe.

We tried to contain,
it projected.

The answer, as usual, was cryptic. The translation her mind made of the Assembly’s feelings was never a smooth process, but she was getting better at understanding. Mira looked to the smoke rising from the lumberyard and the ruined walker there. She moved for it as the arguments continued.

Mira scrutinized the scene, studying the remains, the smoking lumber, and something else, the remnants scattered everywhere, and they were barely recognizable. A car battery, regular AA batteries, coins, washers, all everyday objects, or at least they used to be. They were artifact components, from the Strange Lands, a powerful, dangerous place that no longer existed, and one that, long ago, had meant everything to her.

Mira picked up one of the batteries. She had never seen one that looked like this. It was just a blackened, charred mass, but Mira didn’t think it had anything to do with the fire. Artifacts were supposed to be indestructible outside the Strange Lands, yet these were completely ruined.

Mira was a Freebooter, an expert in such things, and she guessed these had been assembled into a Dynamo, what was essentially a generator, in this case used to power a whole host of tools from the World Before. Air drills, saws, cutting torches. What was strange was that it seemed as if the combination had
exploded,
and that should have been impossible. Combinations lost power and died, but unless their design included the need for some kind of combustion, they didn’t blow up.

Guardian …

Mira heard the sounds of shuffling behind her. Two Hunters stood on either side of her, no more than a foot away, their red, blue, and green three-optic eyes staring into her. Behind them were two Mantises, staring at her in the same way.

Mira sighed. Sometimes they were more like Max than killer alien invaders.

“Yes?” she asked out loud, with impatience.

We tried to contain.

That word again, “contain.” Mira stared back at the wreckage of the walker and the smoking debris and an idea of what had happened here formed. A dozen or more feet away, the argument and the standoff continued.

“It wasn’t them,” Mira announced, looking back at the group. No one seemed to hear her, they were too busy yelling.
“It wasn’t them!”

The accusations stopped. Everyone turned to her.

“It wasn’t
who
?” Christian asked. “The Helix or the Assembly?”

“Either.” She held up one of the blackened coins. “It was your Dynamo, it exploded.”

“Artifact combinations don’t explode,” another Wind Trader engineer stated.

Mira shrugged. “This one did. And this walker,” she motioned to the wrecked body of the machine, “absorbed the explosion. It must have sensed the combination was about to overload and—”

“Used its shield,” Christian replied, thinking it through. Assembly Brutes were the only walkers Mira had seen with energy shields for defense. “Explains why the ground’s charred in an almost perfect circle.”

Mira stood up. Where there had been two Hunters around her, now there were six, with two Brutes behind them. The Assembly always tried to get as close to her as they could, and it could be annoying. The machines moved apart as she walked through them, and Mira could see the distrustful looks from the kids ahead of her. Could she blame them? The Assembly, the great invaders of the planet, following her around like lost puppies?

“I think you owe them an apology, Dasha,” a new voice said. Two other Helix were moving toward the discontent, and Mira knew them well. One was Dane, tall and handsome, with wavy hair and lithe muscles and the easy, assured gait that all Helix seemed to share. The other was Avril, the current leader of the White Helix, though that wasn’t going to last much longer.

The eyes of every White Helix dropped instantly in apprehension. Only the girl, Dasha, kept hers raised. “Apologize … to
them
?” She meant the Assembly.

“Dishonored yourself, haven’t you?” Avril asked back as she and Dane pushed into the crowd. “You’ve raised your masks when there was no call, and you have accused an ally of treachery.”

“They’re not my allies,” the girl retorted. The other Helix seemed nervous. “And you are not my Doyen.”

Avril touched all three of the glowing rings on her middle fingers. Her body flashed in hot, white light. Her movements were lightning quick as she struck outward, and two rapid punches sent Dasha crashing to the ground, staring up in pain and shock.