Cut Off (22 page)

Sebastian glanced into the trees hiding the rest of the compound, then vanished inside the tower. For the next few minutes, Sprite watched the jungle while Ness watched the upper floor. Finally, a tentacle appeared in the ambient glow of the electronics.

"We're set," Ness murmured.

Behind the tower, another trail threaded through the growth. Ness advanced slowly, eyes sharp for the lurking shapes of Swimmers. In the dark, with their sense-pods, they would have a massive advantage on him. Abruptly, the smell of chlorophyll was overwhelmed by human waste. The forest quit—more accurately, it had been erased, replaced by a blue mat of organic growth studded with short pylons that housed the motion detectors. These, however, were currently inert. Assuming Sebastian had done his job. Not that Ness didn't trust him. Except when he was in one of his "the Way will find a way" moods.

Whatever the case, it was do-or-die time. Across ten feet of the blue matting, poles poked from the earth to a height of twenty feet, wires strung between them. They enclosed an acre of ground, almost all of which was taken up by tents. Two more of the orange towers watched from the far side of the enclosure. Seeing no movement from those or the tents, Ness ducked and ran to the wires.

"Are they live?" Sprite whispered.

"Hope not. If I get fried, make sure to punch Sebastian in the balls for me."

There was very little play to the wires, and even with Ness bending two apart, Sprite had to contort himself to get through. Once he was on the other side, he held the wires for Ness, staring over his shoulder at the tents. Ness climbed inside and moved to the nearest tent, a simple V-frame with mosquito netting over the entry. Inside, three men and a women were packed tight, snoring away.

Looking at them, Ness was struck with the sudden feeling this was a mistake. What, he was just going to stroll inside, shake them by the shoulder, then Pied Piper them away to safety? What if none of them spoke English? What if, in the midst of rousing two hundred slaves, one of the Swimmer captors happened to take a glance outside? Or notice their security was down? This place looked like more of an outpost than the Swimmers' version of the Pentagon, but all it would take to put him down was a single blue bolt from above.

"What is it?" Sprite said.

The three words reminded Ness of something vital: he
was
alone here. Sprite didn't have the constitution to do this himself; Sebastian wasn't physically capable of communicating with the captives. Not before they tore him limb from limb, anyway. If they were going to make this happen, it was on his shoulders. If he couldn't get his inside doubts to shut the fuck up and listen to his inside Shawn instead, these people would soon be worked into their graves. And he would slink away knowing the old Ness had won.

"Nothing," he whispered. "Just trying to figure out which of them looks the most English-speaking."

They slept on top of their blankets, dressed in rags, shoeless. Their ribs weren't too poky, but some had sores on their elbows and faces and one man wheezed in his sleep like an overfed bulldog. After deciding she looked nice, Ness knelt beside a woman in her twenties. As he reached for her shoulder, her eyes popped open.

"Shh," he said, pressing one finger to his lips. "English?"

She stared blankly. Sprite said something in Chinese. The woman shook her head, but the fog appeared to lift from her eyes. She sat up, glanced at her bunkmates, and scooted out of her tent. She beckoned Ness to follow and stepped lightly across the ground, a thin mixture of leaves and mud atop the blue matting. Two rows into the tents, she stopped at one, lifted the netting, and spoke softly in a language Ness had never heard before. She withdrew from the tent followed by another woman, slightly older, her black hair short and messy.

"What the hell's goin' on around here?" she said, her words, to Ness' complete surprise, crackling with a Texan accent.

"We're here to rescue you," Ness said, and immediately felt stupid.

She blinked, then stared pointedly at Ness' soaked black briefs. "Who do you represent?"

"Nobody," Ness said. "It's just us."

She gave Sprite the eye. "Is he even armed?"

"Here's the score. We didn't plan on this. We were in the neighborhood, so to speak, and happened to know how to turn off the security system. I thought that might be of interest to you."

"How did you get here?"

"Irrelevant. I'm not offering anything except the chance to get out of this pen. From there, it's all on you—hide in the jungle, swim for it, I don't care. Make your choice and make it now, 'cause time's wasting."

She narrowed her eyes. "How do we know this isn't a trick?"

"Because it can't possibly be worse than being enslaved by aliens?"

The woman laughed wryly. "You got me there. Give me five minutes."

She turned to the first woman and delivered rapid instructions in their local tongue. They returned to their tents, waking the others, who in turn dispersed to other tents. Soft speech arose from all sides. Ness glanced up at the towers, but they showed no lights or signs of alarm.

"Are we done, then?" Sprite said.

Ness mopped his brow. It was humid like crazy and even being nearly nude wasn't much help. Before he could answer, a man's voice rang from across the pen, angry and forceful. Ness cringed, then gritted his teeth and ran toward the shouts. Amid a mixed crowd of puffy-eyed people, a muscled man with a ponytail pointed a heavily tattooed arm at one of the towers, trying and failing to keep his voice down. A number of people vied for his attention, including the short-haired woman.

Ness ran to her and grabbed her biceps. "What's this? Tell him to shut the fuck up!"

"What do you think I've been doing?" she said. "He doesn't want to go."

"He wants to stay a
slave
?"

"He says he can't leave the slavers alive. He says if we do that, they'll replace us with others."

Ness ran that past his inside star and verified it was a good complaint. "That's hypothetical. What's for sure is that you can be free, right now."

In the brief time they'd been speaking, the crowd had thickened, pumping their fists above their heads. Although Ness was used to traveling among much stranger company, it struck him that he was the only white face in the bunch. The woman turned away to argue with the ponytailed man, who shook his head vigorously, veins standing out from his temples. His neck was patterned with tribal tattoos.

Ness found his own arm tugged on by Sprite. "Is it a disaster yet?"

Ness could feel the situation slipping away. He gazed up at the tower housing Sebastian, but saw no movement within. Fortunately, he saw nothing doing at the other towers, either. With no sense of hearing, the aliens would take nothing from the shouting, and with their motion sensors down, it could well take an active check for them to understand anything was awry.

Yet it would take no more than a quick glance from above to recognize the mob forming. The mob that appeared to be bent on tearing the installation down to the blue mat at its base. Unless he stepped in now.

He regained the woman's attention. "Tell him to worry about wrecking this place later. Come back once you're prepared for war."

She nodded and got in the man's face, speaking rapidly. The man's expression softened in thought, then he shook his head, cheeks hard with decision, and shouted more orders. Men began pulling down tents and yanking out the metal poles that had held them up.

"They want to fight," the woman said, voice tight. "While we have surprise on our side."

"This is dumb as hell. They're angry, that's all. And it's going to get them killed."

She nodded and spoke more to the man, but he ignored her, shouting at the crowd, pointing them to the tower on the north side of the enclosure. Ness checked the window of the eastern tower and saw Sebastian's silhouette overlooking the grounds.

He grabbed the woman's elbow. "A lot of people are about to die. You need to get everyone who'll listen to reason out of here right now."

She swept her hand down her face, grimacing, and dived into the crowd, gesturing toward the fences. Ness turned his back on her, nodded at Sprite, and sprinted toward the wire wall, mud splattering from his feet. He had a problem on his hands deeper than the obvious one: Steven Seagal over there was looking to put together an alien hunt. Sebastian, unfortunately, happened to be an alien. Ness' inside star could shout its angelic lungs out, but the choice between these prisoners and his best-and-only friend wasn't a choice at all.

The camp was a roiling mass of people, most of whom were schooling toward the north wall, contorting their way through the wires. Ness had just reached the east wall when the lights snapped on in the other two towers. People screamed. Ness pushed down on a wire with all his weight. While Sprite was swinging his trailing leg across, the first blue beam sizzled between the north tower and the ground.

The screams tripled. Lights bloomed in the east tower, too. Ness crossed the fence and peeked behind him. People streamed through the wires of the north wall, piling inside its tower while the aliens within it rained fire at those bottlenecked by the fence.

"Christ on toast, they're
shooting
people over there!" Sprite said, voice pitching into a screech.

"That's why we're over here." Ness drew his pistol and jogged into the trees, pulse hammering in his ears.

Shouts and cries pierced the jungle. Most were of pain, but some were of triumph. Had he run too hastily? What if the humans were going to win this thing? But that wasn't the issue, was it? The main thing was he'd come to get them out, not to start a fight. Yet they had to go and screw everything up. He ought to have seen this coming. Screwing things up was what people did. Guilt flooded through his veins. If anything happened to Sebastian, he'd come back and murder them himself.

Brush snapped from ahead. Ness froze, throwing out an arm to stop Sprite. Thirty feet down the path, a tangle of legs sped through the undergrowth. Ness raised his weapon and drew a bead. The alien's sense-pods shot up.

"Sebastian?" Ness signed.

It rushed forward. Ness' finger twitched on the trigger buttons. Then he saw its eyes, the way they were slightly wider spaced than most, angled up in a way that appeared but probably wasn't kindly, and he ran to meet Sebastian, who patted him with three different tentacles, as if reassuring himself Ness was intact.

"What happens?" Sebastian signed hurriedly.

"The slaves would rather take revenge than freedom. I say we—" Footsteps thumped behind them. Escapees dashed down the trail, invisible besides the beige of their rags. Blue lights flashed from the nearby tower, silhouetting the fleeing slaves. Ness swore. "Talk later. Run now."

Sebastian nodded once, spun in place, and accelerated toward the shore. Lasers snapped through the air. At first Ness figured they were the target, that the aliens were firing blindly down into the jungle, hoping to at least corral or disrupt the escape, but the angle of the shots was nearly flat. Could be a matter of perspective. As Ness stared up, a branch whacked him in the face, raking his cheek and staggering him.

"No," Sebastian said, tentacle whipping through the air. "No no no!"

"I'm fine," Ness signed, but Sebastian went on repeating. "Quit flailing and use your words!"

"No no no no no no—"

The trees thinned; they were nearly to the beach. Out to sea, a spear of fire arced down from the sky, gouting smoke behind it, and slammed into the surface. A pillar of red-white fire erupted upward and began to mushroom. Sebastian slapped his tentacles against the sand, slowing himself in a spray of grit. Ness skidded beside him. A blast of force and heat struck him full on, the thunder of the explosion crackling behind it. As Ness struggled to process what he was staring at, the first pieces of the sub began to rain to the beach.

15

The blow was a quick, straight punch, more about dazing the opponent and setting them up for a takedown strike than in stopping the fight itself. But Ke wasn't expecting it and he was striding right into it, thoughtfully lending her his momentum. Tristan's knuckles snapped into his chin. His head yanked sideways. He staggered from the stairs, reeling like a drunk mouse in a Warner Bros. cartoon, and fell into the grass. He blinked at Tristan in confusion and betrayal, as if they were friends and she'd insulted him unexpectedly in front of a crowd.

"Ke!" Robi pounded down the stairs, brushing past Tristan to kneel beside her brother. "Are you all right?"

Ke touched his mouth and gazed at the smudge of blood on his fingers. "She hit me? She hit me. I need to go hit
her.
"

"No you don't!"

"Fair's fair." He tried to stand but couldn't keep his balance, slapping the ground for support. Tristan snorted.

Alden grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. "What the hell was that?"

She removed her shoulder from his grip. "Stopping a fight?"

"More like starting one!"

"You've got a lot to learn." She moved a step closer to Ke. "Are you hurt?"

"Hell no." He tried again to stand and this time he succeeded. "That's bullshit, hit a man when he isn't looking."

"Want to try again?"

He smiled hard and stepped within striking range. "You want it?"

"Knock it off!" Robi stepped between them, poking Ke in the chest with her finger. "You came here to bring me home, right? So let's go home."

He glared at Tristan a moment, then shifted his gaze to Alden. "Stay away, man."

He turned to go, wiping his lip. Tristan watched them go, feeling the adrenaline playing through her veins. She used to hate conflict and had associated this feeling with a churning stomach and the notion that things were in discord, breaking down, hopeless. You could patch things up later, glue the relationship back together, but the cracks remained. Sooner or later it broke for good.

Now, though, it was a good feeling. It meant she'd acted. Headed off a threat. Conflict wasn't necessarily a portent of decay. Instead, it was a weapon to keep that decay away from you—if you had the balls to use it.