Dominion (19 page)

“Careful,” he said.

Jean knelt, inserted the knife just above the point at which Lindsay's arrow had entered the Cutter's skull, and began to slice. It was hard work, but the blade's serrated edge helped. With Nessa's assistance, Jean peeled back the folds of the Cutter's scalp, exposing its skull and, at its base, the hole through which the arrow had entered. It was big enough to accommodate Jean's small fist. She reached inside.

“I have it,” she said.

She yanked. There was some resistance.

“I think it's the arrow,” she said.

Mackay joined them and tugged, and the arrow came free. When Jean's hand emerged again, it was holding one of the Others. It was big, the biggest they'd yet seen. It was about the size of a kitten, a really hideous, hairless, prawn-like kitten. The arrow had pierced it through the core, killing it instantly along with the Cutter.

It confirmed what they had suspected. Like some of the Illyri, the alien Cutters acted as hosts for the Others, but the ones that the Cutters carried were more developed than any they had previously found in the skulls of the Illyri they'd managed to kill over the last year or two, or at least the handful they'd been able to get to before they destroyed themselves in a burst of spores. This one hadn't been given time to self-destruct.

Fremd believed that these Others might be of a higher order, and the Cutters enabled them to move around, to roam their new realm, for they were the rulers of Earth now. In return for hosting them, the foul Cutters got to feed on what was left of humans after the spores had emerged. Sometimes, as in the case of poor Dolan, they feasted while their victims were still alive.

“Get one of the jars,” Trask instructed. “We'll take it back to Fremd.”

It had taken a great deal of convincing for Trask to agree with Fremd's request to examine any remains of the Others that they found. Fremd had assured him that the lab was secure, and Trask had eventually, if reluctantly, recognized that to understand the Others, and determine their vulnerabilities, specimens were needed. He drew the line at live ones, though, even if they'd been able to find any, and any spore sacs had to be destroyed before the remains were allowed into the bunker. Jean did that now, gently removing the sac from the underside of the Other. It was barely bigger than her thumb. She found some mineral spirits on the garage shelf, poured it on the sac, and set it alight, while Nessa fetched a sample jar and shoved the Other into it.

By now the sun was going down, and a shaft of brilliant light burst through the dusty window. Red spores danced like dust in its beam. Damn, they'd be covered in them. The suits and vehicles would have to be decontaminated with a vengeance. He looked over at Burgess's body in its suit, and what was left of Dolan. They could bag Burgess and return him for burial. It wouldn't be pleasant for his wife and kid, but at least they'd have a chance to say goodbye, and Burgess wasn't the first who'd been buried in that kind of state. But Dolan . . .

Mackay joined him, and followed the direction of his gaze.

“God,” she said. “What'll we do?”

“We'll tell his wife the truth,” said Trask, “or most of it; a Cutter got him, and he died quickly, but there was nothing left of him to bury.”

“But we can't just leave his remains here.”

“We'll dig a hole. I guess someone can say a prayer. It makes no difference to him now.”

Lindsay helped Mackay to put Burgess into a body bag—they always traveled with them, but never referred to them until they were needed, a small superstition to which everyone adhered—while Nessa and Jean did the same with what was left of Dolan. Trask dug a shallow hole for him in the field at the back of the garage, but they did not mark the spot for fear of alerting still more drones to their presence. Instead, Trask's daughters scattered leaves on the grave, and Lindsay said a quick prayer. Her grandfather had been a preacher of some sort, and she knew all the words for the services, but Dolan got only the briefest of farewells. Something was bound to come looking to see what had happened to the occupant of the drone, and they wanted to be well on their way back to the bunker by that time.

They set out for home in the dark, driving slowly because they couldn't use headlights. True, drones might pick up the heat of the trucks, and they would be visible to night-vision scanners, but there was no point in making things any easier for the invaders than they had to be. Anyway, the drones would have to be overflying the right area to spot them, and there were fewer of them to do that than before. They'd just been unlucky with the one earlier in the day.

Trask stayed with Lindsay, and his girls and Mackay followed in the truck. They had gas, diesel, some weapons, lots of canned food, and a big sample for Fremd to examine, but it had cost them two men. At least his daughters were safe; that was something. But he didn't know for how much longer they could continue like this. Sooner or later, the Cutters would get them all, or the spores would. Their world had been turned against them. They were like cockroaches hiding in the shadows, waiting to be exterminated.

T
he
Gradus
, the Corps cruiser assigned to monitor the mouth of the Derith wormhole, was one of the newest in the fleet. It had been named after the late Grand Consul Gradus at the request of his widow, the Archmage Syrene, who had worn her navy-blue widow's robes to its inaugural voyage—a grand affair where all had feted her, and crowds had cheered. As far as the commander of the
Gradus
was concerned, Syrene and the rest of her sort could take a jump into a boiling pit of lava for all the difference it would make to him. For someone who had chosen to cloister herself in the Marque, he grumbled to himself, Syrene certainly spent a lot of time playing the grand public dame. Well, she used to, before she apparently vanished into the depths of the Marque to meditate, or play with voodoo dolls, or scratch her backside, or whatever it was the Nairenes did behind its walls.

The commander yawned. His name was Waltere, and he had been staring at the Derith wormhole for so long that he saw it in his sleep. Already the
Gradus
's tour of duty at Derith had been extended twice, despite assurances from CentCom, the Corps' new central command, that he and his crew would soon be put to more productive use. He was growing uncomfortably familiar with that promise, and it was starting to sound distinctly hollow.

CentCom had been established at the outbreak of the war, when a new structure became necessary in order to ensure that communications remained uncompromised by the Military. For Waltere, it was just another layer of officialdom and bureaucracy. The Corps seemed to be forming new subgroups, and instituting additional protocols, on a daily basis, all of them designed to disguise the fact—whisper it—that the war was most definitely not going according to plan. Oh, the initial attack on Melos Station had gone brilliantly, removing from the board, with one massive explosion, a good quarter of the Military hierarchy, and a tenth of its ships. Unfortunately, all of the other assaults had been botched, either partially or entirely, mostly because the Corps had grown soft. That was what happened when the Military was left to handle the dirty work of conquest: its troops became battle-hardened and seasoned, while Corps forces were only good for mopping up the stragglers, or directing traffic.

The Securitats were another matter, although even they got in much of their practice from torturing civilians—Waltere had done one tour of duty on Earth, in France, and had no illusions about how the Securitats went about their business. But there weren't enough of the Securitats for them to be able to engage in full confrontations with the Military without massive Corps support, and the two organizations had their own command structures, neither of which entirely trusted the other. Meanwhile, a good chunk of the Military remained intact, although scattered or in hiding, popping out only to launch lighting guerrilla raids on Corps ships and stations before retreating back to their hidden bases. But the rumors were that the Military was preparing for a massive counterattack, in the hope of regaining the Illyr system, and the homeworld, and forcing the Corps and its allies either to surrender or sue for peace. To be fair, those rumors had been circulating since the start of the war, when it became clear that the initial attacks designed to decapitate the Military had failed, but they'd been growing in intensity in recent times.

Sometimes, Waltere thought that he might have picked the wrong side in this fight, but it was too late to change now.

The
Gradus
, although big, had a skeleton crew of just twelve, operating in three rotations. It boasted state-of-the-art shielding and weaponry, none of which it had yet had a chance to test. Boredom had made the crew fractious and difficult. Being trapped in a tin can beside a remote wormhole tended to have that effect. Only the regular bursts of contact from CentCom through the beacon arrays confirmed that the
Gradus
had not been forgotten entirely.

Waltere blamed his ship's name. He had been present when Syrene requested—ordered, in anyone else's language, since what the Archmage wanted, she got—that the
Gradus
assume primary responsibility for monitoring the wormhole. He knew that the only reason anyone still cared about Derith was because the Archmage's stepdaughter had vanished into it, along with a handful of humans, two of whom might have been involved in Grand Consul Gradus's death. The real meat on those tenuous bones, and the only interesting thing about the mission, was that a Mech had accompanied the escapees.

Waltere had never seen one of the artificial beings. They were all supposed to have been destroyed before he was born. He didn't hold out much hope of seeing the one that had entered the Derith wormhole anytime soon. Whatever lay on the other side of that hole was bad news: a giant meteor field, a sun, a collapsing star . . . Someone had even suggested aliens. Waltere had almost laughed at that one, until he saw something flicker in the face of Syrene and some of the senior Corps officials when the possibility was mentioned. He'd said nothing, but their reaction had remained with him.

Now he sat slumped in his captain's chair, staring at that blasted wormhole, thinking of all the possibilities for glory and advancement that had passed him by while the
Gradus
floated in this backwater of the universe. It was all an illusion, of course. Waltere was not particularly bright, but he was savvy enough to know that he would never excel in the field. If he'd actually fought in the war, then he'd either be dead or injured by this point; that, or given a posting far from the lines where he couldn't do any harm.

A bit like this one, he supposed.

Yallee, his second in command, stepped into his field of vision. Yallee wasn't very pretty, but then Waltere wasn't very handsome. With nothing else to do on board the
Gradus
, she and Waltere had begun a casual affair. It wasn't a good idea, of course, even if they were both single, because it wasn't like there was any way of getting away from each other when they fought, which was increasingly often. It was also against all regulations. They could both be court-martialed if CentCom discovered their relationship, although at least that would mean they would both be sent back to Illyr for trial. Waltere was occasionally tempted to confess, just so he could return home. If he did, he and Yallee wouldn't be going back alone. One half of the crew was permanently sleeping with the other half: they got together, they broke up, they got together with someone else. He had trouble keeping track of who was bedding down with whom. By contrast, he and Yallee had been together for so long that they counted as an old married couple by the standards of the
Gradus
.

“It's time for a drill,” said Yallee.

“Really?” said Waltere. He had a headache, and the noise of the drill siren would only make it worse. “Maybe we could just postpone.”

Nobody liked drills. It meant waking those crew members who were asleep, or disturbing those who were off duty, just to line them up before the captain's chair so Waltere could be sure that, if anything did happen, they might actually be prepared to deal with it. During the last drill, Holtus, one of the engineers, had simply refused to leave his bed, and not even the appearance of Waltere beside his bunk threatening him at gunpoint had convinced him to get out of it. Eventually, Waltere had put away his pulser and gone back to his chair. It just didn't seem worth the effort . . .

Later he'd had a talk with Holtus, who accepted that, among other things, it was bad for morale to have him disobey a direct order. Holtus agreed to appear for drills as long as they were scheduled for a time when he wasn't asleep, which wasn't ideal from Waltere's point of view but was still better than nothing. Unfortunately, when this arrangement became widely known, nobody else wanted to be woken up either, so now drills were scheduled for when shifts ended, and the time was posted a day in advance so everyone knew when to expect it. This completely defeated the purpose of drills, but nobody cared, least of all Waltere, because nothing ever happened here anyway.

Which was why, when the ship appeared from the Derith wormhole, it took him a few moments to register its presence. He could see it, but his brain, numbed by inactivity, struggled to accept the reality of it. Eventually, he managed to get the words out.

“That's a ship!” he said, standing up.

Yallee turned to look. By the time she saw it, Waltere had already sounded the alert, and the siren raged through the
Gradus
.

“You'd better tell them that it's not a drill,” said Yallee.

Good idea, thought Waltere. He hit his coms button.

“This is not a drill,” he announced. “Repeat: this is not a drill. Seriously.”