Son of Justice (28 page)

“The
exact
destination,” Eli stressed. His knees might have buckled had it not been for his armor as a wave of lightheaded cool splashed across the heat of his suppressed grief. Benson and Twigg might still be alive. “So you have a general idea of where it’s taken two of my soldiers?”

“And probably hundreds of others,” Tenney chimed in. She was inspecting the strange Zrthn doorway, which still sat in the middle of the comm station where they had found it.

The two Waa shared a small look and blinked their large eyes once. Twice.

“May we speak with you in private, Captain,” the one called Aank asked?

“You can speak freely in front of Lieutenant Tenney,” Eli answered. “She’s my XO, and can hear whatever you need to tell me.”

“It’s not a problem, Eli,” she replied. “I can wait outside.”

Eli was preparing to respond to the contrary when he felt a . . . touch. Only it wasn’t a physical touch. It was entirely mental, and it carried a sense of caution and urgency that he felt compelled to obey.

“What the—” he began, but a second “touch” stopped him from completing the sentence.

We must communicate with you privately, Captain Justice.

The words entered his head, but not through his ears. He clamped his jaws closed in surprise and listened, suddenly anxious to understand what had just taken place. He watched silently as the two Waa looked directly at him and blinked again in unison.

Please, Captain. This cannot be shared with others
.

He saw-felt-heard the urgency in the request as a breath of mental calmness settled his thoughts. The combination let him know with complete certainty the request was both rational and necessary. With a sense of wonder, he knew the two Waa had just communicated with him in a fashion that seemed beyond real. Until now, he had assumed only the Telgorans were capable of such communication, but this proved otherwise. He wondered if his father knew the Waa were capable of mind-speak.

Of course he does, Eli.
The reply was immediate, and he felt it as much as heard it.
And it is on his orders that no one else should know how we communicate
.

“But you let me—” he began before another mental touch—this one pleading for secrecy and discretion—stopped his voice.

Lieutenant Tenney does not mind waiting outside. You only need to ask her to do so. Then we can continue.

“Lieutenant, can you give us a few minutes?”

“No problem, Captain,” she answered and headed for the door. “I need to check on the company anyway. I won’t be far away. Just let me know if you need anything.”

“Thank you. We shouldn’t be long.”

When the door to the comm station shut behind Tenney, Eli turned to the two Waa. He had a thousand questions to ask and didn’t know where to begin.

He needn’t have worried; the Waa took over and explained everything.

* * *

“Let everyone know the situation. We don’t know where we are going to end up. For all we know, we’ll get dumped into the middle of space and die, so our efforts might be wasted.”

“But the Waa said we’d end up on a Zrthn ship,” Tenney argued.

“No,” Eli countered. “They said we’d
probably
end up on a Zrthn ship. It’s not a certainty. According to their inspection of the transport device, the far-transfer location is constantly changing. It moves through space like a ship would move, and it’s on a trajectory for Telgora.”

“Which means it’s a ship.”

“No. It means it’s
probably
a ship,” Eli reiterated. “The Zrthn tendency to capture their opponents, and use them as slave labor instead of killing them, reinforces that probability. But it still isn’t a certainty. Whoever agrees to go through that doorway needs to understand the difference. This could very well be a suicide mission.”

“Everyone will agree to go,” Tenney stated. “Captain Zin, the commander of B Company, has already volunteered his warriors.”

“The fact that this isn’t a certainty means we
can’t
take everyone, Tenney. We can’t risk two ranger companies on a mission like this. At most, I’m willing to lead a platoon from each company. One platoon of armored humans, combined with a second platoon of experienced Minith.”

“Oh, so
you’re
going to lead this suicide mission?” The exasperation on his XO’s face and in her voice was clear, and he understood how she was feeling. He’d feel the same in her position.

“Hey, I can’t ask anyone to go through that door unless I’m willing to do it also,” he stated, then smiled. “Besides, it’s
probably
not a suicide mission.”

* * *

The Waa engineers had located and disabled what they believed to be the auditory device from the door, which they now knew to be some type of transportation portal.

Eli hadn’t wanted any mistakes, so only Second Platoon of A Company was stationed outside the comm station doorway. Their external speaker systems had been disabled. The forty Minith warriors from B Company were in a holding position fifty meters back from the comm station. If the device’s sirenlike call wasn’t disabled, Sergeant Ellison, who had been tasked with switching the unit on, would receive notification from Tenney, who waited with the rest of the company at their original landing and observation point. He’d quickly turn the unit off again, and they’d regroup to try something else. Aank and Ta’an, the two Waa engineers, waited with the Minith. Their task was to shut down the transporter after the last soldier went through.

When everyone was in position, Eli, who stood at the head of the line of PEACE-armored rangers, gave Ellison a nod.

“Hit it, Ellison,” he said simply.

Ellison took a second to locate the switch and activate the doorway. As soon as he did, the interior of the comm station was filled with a bright light. The light came from the door frame and, to Eli’s surprise, appeared to outline a view of what lay on the other side. To his relief, he didn’t see the cold emptiness of open space. Instead, he spied what looked like a darkened room or hallway. What little he could make out of their destination seemed damp and dark, but there was no indication that a Zrthn reception committee lay in wait. For the most part, as these things went, it looked like an ideal situation into which to throw oneself along with eighty fellow soldiers.

Eli lifted his Ginny shotgun, took a deep breath, and waited for the signal from Tenney, verifying the siren wasn’t working its magic on the unarmored Minith outside the station.

“You’re good to go, Captain,” he heard seconds later.

He took another deep breath of canned air and took the first step toward what was—
probably
—the interior of a Zrthn spaceship.

* * *

“Senior Leader Ootoon, the sensors in the receiving room have just been activated. It appears as though we have more of the bi-peds incoming.”

Ootoon opened his eyes slowly and twisted his head 360 degrees to remove the kinks from his neck. Being awakened from a deep slumber was never pleasant. To hear the reasoning was another incoming bevy of the pale two-legged creatures made the awakening even less cheerful. With luck, it would be another small catch like the last. Two of the ugly creatures were much easier to handle than the hundreds they had previously taken in and processed.

“Very well, Ohlo,” the senior officer of the captivity ship sighed. “Send the catch to sorting bay two, and alert Senior Sorter Ah-loon of the incoming.”

“Yes, Senior Leader.” Ohlo lazily activated the conveyor belt that would deliver the bi-pends to the sorting facility, then sent an alert to the jailer responsible for the processing phase of their work.

As he went through his routine, Ohlo once again pondered his fate. As he had done a thousand times over the past weeks, he asked himself the now-hated question: why had he been posted to this monotonously boring captivity ship, instead of to a fighting unit aboard the main battle cruiser? He was the lone swimmer of all his pod-mates to be handed this existence, and he had come to grudgingly accept that he would never see a real fight. Prone forms on a conveyor, or a room stuffed with unwilling captives, were his life now.

Ugh.

He would trade a year’s worth of undersea rations to trade places with his mates on the main ship. They were no doubt beginning their preparations for the upcoming battle.

All he could do was sit tight and wait for their eventual delivery of more pink and green bi-peds.

Eli stepped through the doorway and noted his suit’s display register an immediate change to the atmospheric temperature and humidity. He landed easily on the floor and felt it give slightly. As they had discussed, he passed through the doorway and spun his body immediately to the left. His Ginny, aided by the armor’s weapons targeting system, sought out targets or threats. He quickly found himself facing a wall and spun back to the right.

The first trooper of the platoon had already stepped through the doorway behind him and had encountered a similar occurrence on the right. They were in a long corridor that was approximately three meters wide. The walls were moist with condensation and Eli watched as a trickle of condensation formed on the wall to his left. It ran down the wall to the floor where it was absorbed.

Zrthns certainly like to keep things a bit moist
, he thought.

The doorway they had stepped through was positioned against the back wall of the area. As a result, the armored soldiers stepping through the door only had one direction to travel. Forward.

He was giving orders to the third and fourth soldiers through the doorway to keep moving forward when the floor beneath their feet suddenly jerked into motion and began a slow, but steady conveyor belt-like carry, which moved them toward the darkened doorway at the end of the corridor.

“Jenkins,” he called out to the first trooper in the line. “Move forward with the floor, but hold up at that door and wait for the rest of the unit.”

He got a nod from the soldier, then began to walk backward against the flowing floor. He easily maintained his position next to the portal and passed along similar instructions for the others entering the ship to move ahead. He paused long enough to look back through the portal to the far side. It appeared normal. He guessed he could easily pass back through to the other side if he wanted.

Interesting. It leads both ways
, he thought.

His curiosity satisfied for the moment, he turned and trotted to the far end of the corridor where the first troopers had begun to assemble. He joined their reverse-walk maneuver to maintain their position just this side of the open doorway that lay ahead. The moving, spongelike floor took a sharp ninety-degree turn to the left just beyond the opening, and he wondered where it led. They’d find out soon enough. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the first of the Minith soldiers come through the portal. Not wanting to group his force in such a confined space he decided it was time to move forward.

“Lock, load, and lookout, rangers. It’s time to see what lies ahead,” he announced to the men and women surrounding him, then took a step forward.

* * *

Ah-loon moved quickly toward the sorting room. His blue-colored body paint had been reapplied just hours before and shimmered as he moved through the passageway. He wore the paint with pride, satisfied with his rank and place in the pod that was this ship. His three assistants followed closely behind. The natural gray of their skin—while beautiful in its own way—seemed dim and dull when compared to his paint.
As intended.

Rank had its privileges, and he wore his with pride. Blue paint might be in their futures if they worked hard, and made satisfactory contracts with their superiors, but he saw little potential in this lot. Ah-loon could tell by the way their arms drooped by their sides and by the lack of bounce in their collective gait, that none were pleased with their lot in this particular navy. No doubt they felt they should be on board the main ship, preparing for the battle. He had once been of the same mind, but had long ago fallen into his assigned role with something resembling bored resignation. They too would eventually learn to accept their place, or they would be destined to a life as a mere gray-skin. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

They needed a good, long sort to take their minds off their current existence, and Ah-loon wondered what waited ahead. He hoped the room was filled with unconscious bi-peds awaiting their attention. The work was sometimes interesting, if not overly exciting. They were responsible for inspecting the catch closely, removing weapons and other potentially interesting equipment, sorting them into categories—specifically pink and green on the last few hauls—and sending each of the strange creatures off to their respective pens. Each haul was usually good for a surprise or two. They had found several new weapons in the last few catches, for instance, as well as a new category of bi-ped. They had called that one “metallic” and had sent it off for inspection. He reminded himself to check in with Antoo, the researcher who had been given that task. He had neither seen nor heard from the other since he had started his work. If he knew Antoo, he was tentacles-deep in the inspection and wouldn’t come up for air until he had all of his questions answered.

Ah-loon and his small contingent of sorters reached the doorway. He placed his fingers into the appropriate circle-scanner position and pressed. The doorway retracted to the right, just as he expected.

The catch that waited inside, however, wasn’t anything like he expected.

* * *

Eli and the leading contingent of the force had just ridden the moving floor into a large room filled with tables, bins, and strange equipment when the door on the far side of the room slid open. Just outside the door, stood several large aliens. For a long moment, neither group reacted. That changed when one of the aliens lifted a tube-shaped object and pointed it in their direction.

Eli jumped toward the aliens, allowing the powered suit to launch his body halfway across the wide area, in a single bound. At the same time, he lifted the shotgun, which was only effective at shorter distances, and tracked the group of Zrthns. Only one had raised a tube (weapon?) so he focused his aim there and pulled the trigger. The hundred or so tiny ball bearings crossed the distance in a fraction of a second. As they were designed, they spread outward in a brutal spray that sliced through the Zrthn and two of his (her?) unfortunate companions.