Son of Justice (6 page)

Eli smiled, pleased to know that their effort at winnowing out more humans hadn’t succeeded.

“He wants to see you first thing in the morning.”

Eli’s smile disappeared. His ability to keep a low profile had apparently ended. He considered how the sergeant might react to his actions and wondered what kind of trouble those actions had called down on his head. It was a brief thought, though. With a realization that was as sudden as it was unexpected, Eli found he didn’t really care what the alien thought, or how he might react.

“Hey guys,” a female voice interrupted. He lifted his head and saw Adrienne Tenney approaching the bunk. The unofficial leader of third platoon nodded to Benson, then ducked under the top bunk and sat down on the edge of Eli’s bed. “How’s the patient?”

“The patient’s fine,” Benson replied, still looking down from his perch. “For now, anyway. He’s got a date with Twiggy in the morning, though. You might want to check back then.”

“I’m not worried,” Eli offered, but the titled head and blank stare he received from Benson informed that maybe he should be. “Okay, maybe I’m worried a little bit. Not much I can do about it now, though. What’s done is done.

“I understand I owe you a ‘thank you,” he said to Tenney as he pushed his tired body into a seated position. Somehow, it didn’t feel right to be lying down with her sitting less than a foot away.

She waved a casual hand at the suggestion. “Don’t mention it, Jayson. You saved a bunch of my guys with the advance warning. And those theatrics at the end of the march. What made you turn back and help the stragglers?”

Eli pondered the question. He knew what made him do it—his loathing for the Minith sergeants, and the overwhelming need he’d felt for his kind to succeed—but he didn’t think he could adequately verbalize any of that, so offered up a simplified version. “I didn’t want to lose another person. That’s my new motto: ‘No more washouts.’ From here on out, I’m going to help anyone who needs it.”

“Very nice,” Tenney nodded, then cocked her head and squinted, as if studying him. “I like that.” She then reached out her right hand and gently squeezed his knee. Eli swallowed the knot in his throat and tried not to shy away from the unexpected attention.

“Well . . . feel free to use it,” he said. His tongue seemed thick in his mouth and he felt a flush of heat cross his face. He wondered if she’d notice. He didn’t know why she made him feel so self-conscious, but it had nothing to with her recognizing him. No, it wasn’t that. This felt . . . different. He’d never had much opportunity to speak with girls; there weren’t many on Waa. “And really. Thank you for saving my skin. You’re the only reason I’m not a washout.”

Tenney nodded and stood up. The height of Benson’s bunk meant she didn’t have to duck to be seen.

“Well, this guy here helped,” she said, pointing her chin up at Eli’s bunkmate. Benson had grown quiet over the past two minutes, which was completely out of character. “I’m going to head back to my platoon now. Good luck with your sergeant tomorrow. I’ll check back to see how it went.”

“Great,” Eli replied, his voice cracking with the single word. He cleared his throat. “I’m sure it will be fine. As far as I know, I didn’t break any rules.”

She offered Eli a small wave, nodded a goodbye to Benson, and turned. Eli couldn’t help but watch as she walked down the aisle and out the door. When she was out of view, he turned to find Benson staring at him, a wide grin plastered to his face.

“What?” he asked the upside-down face that peered back at him.

“I think she likes you, EJ,” Benson said, retracting his head. The bed shook slightly as he flopped heavily onto the mattress of the top bunk. “And I
know
you like her.”

Eli found his mouth moving to contest his friend’s assertions, but he suddenly—surprisingly—found himself incapable of forming a single word.

* * *

“Two years,” Grant sighed and absorbed the information. Two more years until the ship is completed. There was nothing to be done to expedite the timeline, so he merely nodded and kept walking. He automatically shortened his pace to accommodate the shorter legs of the three Waa conducting the tour. They were in one of the large, underground facilities where the Waa engineers constructed all alliance ships. This particular facility was larger than most, having been built specifically for this new breed of vessel. Due to the secrecy around its construction, Grant was the only non-Waa to have access to the area and he stared up at the behemoth that had been his brainchild.

The outer hull and all of the interior walls, walkways, and crew compartments were completed, which gave the initial impression the ship was further along in production. But he knew the delay was always the command and control systems—the components of the mother ship that governed the electrical, fusion, and drive systems. And—in this ship anyway—the weapons systems.

“How are tests of the ship-born cannons coming along?”

They have all been successful.
The Waa’s “words” were accompanied by a sense of proud accomplishment and visions of the large cannons being fired, both in underground testing facilities and in the orbiting firing range that had been built specifically for the purpose of conducting the test. It was important to test the device using the real-world conditions that came along with space-based use.

“Very good, Yuh. You and your workers have done an admirable job.” Grant stopped hiding his thoughts just long enough to communicate his feelings of pleasure, pride, and appreciation for what the Waa had accomplished. He was getting better at keeping his thoughts masked and, at Sha’n’s suggestion, was using this tour as a test of his abilities. She was trailing the group at a short distance, with the sole purpose of “listening in” on his thoughts.

Ten minutes later, the tour concluded, and the general and his advisor were promptly escorted to a carrier vehicle. At a nod from Grant, the pilot lifted off and began the short, thirty-minute trip back to the Shiale Alliance Defense Headquarters compound.

How did it go?
he asked Sha’n.

It went well. I could not detect your thoughts, nor could the others.
She transferred a feeling of consternation and confusion that conveyed how the other Waa had felt at the unexpected situation. Grant chuckled. He didn’t have to imagine the surprise the unsuspecting Waa had felt at finding a human whose thoughts couldn’t be read. Sha’n communicated it perfectly.

“It only works when I verbalize,” Grant relayed. “I couldn’t mask anything using mind-speak.”

Agreed.

“What is it, Sha’n?” He had detected a note of concern in her “voice.”

I could not see your thoughts on the ship, but I did capture a hint of unease in your being. So did the others. They suspect it had to do with the timeline. But I know it has to do with the ship and the weapons it is designed to carry. Why does this worry you?

I don’t know,
he admitted.
It shouldn’t.

He let his thoughts wander, knowing she’d pick up on whatever crossed his mind. Sometimes it was best to just think and let her observe. It was the nonverbal version of talking out loud.

This new mothership we’re building. It will be the first of its kind. There’s never been a ship that’s carried its own arsenal of weapons, which means we’re looking at a paradigm shift—a new way of fighting our enemies. On the surface, that seems good, because it could shift the balance of power firmly in our direction. Until now, these ships have been limited to carrying planet-bound armies and fighters. That means battles have been fought on the ground, soldier against soldier, army against army. But now we’re introducing a weapons-bearing mothership that has the ability to destroy other ships in space, before they ever reach a planet’s surface-based defenses. In other words, we win the battle before it starts. Honestly, I don’t know why this has never been considered before. I mean, I know why the Minith didn’t think of it—they’re all about the ground and pound. But why haven’t the Zrthn or some other race out there somewhere thought about this capability? It boggles the mind. Six hundred years ago, humans had funny little devices called televisions, where fictional stories told about space-going battleships. Even then, long before humans ever reached the stars, our minds considered the creation and plausibility of starship-born weapons. We gave them interesting names like photon torpedoes, plasma cannons, and neutron mines.

Grant released a long sigh.

Then again, maybe we’re just built that way—to keep progressing, to find the next big thing, even if the next big thing is something designed to kill.

Grant struggled with how to express his thoughts in a way that delivered his concern to Sha’n without the overwhelming burden of the emotions he was feeling.

But the problem with introducing a new weapon is the same problem that mankind has been dealing with since we first picked up a stick to club our enemies in the next village. Once the genie is out of the bottle—once we pick up that stick—there’s nothing to keep our enemies from reaching for their own stick. Any advantage we gain from putting a new type of mothership into service is only momentary. Once we cross that threshold, others will soon follow. Then we have a race to see who can build the most ships or the biggest ships. It opens up a can of worms that might eventually destroy the Alliance.

I see, and I understand. Should we cease production?

“No, Sha’n,” Grant replied and tried to rub the ache of fatigue from his eyes. “It’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle. And we might need her to survive what’s ahead. We just won’t use her unless there’s no other option.”

Eli exited his barracks building and turned left toward the building where Twigg and the other sergeants resided. The training complex was made up of four similar cement block buildings, set in a box pattern. A large, open space, known as the quad, resided in the middle of the building group and was where their daily formations were held and much of their training took place. He bowed his head against the ever-present wind, and hurried his steps. The gusts were always worse in what they called “morning.” Morning was such a discretionary concept when the sun never left the sky. For their unit, morning was merely the time of the day when the sleep cycle ended and the next training day began. It took some getting used to for everyone, but most were now in tune with the new normal.

Not for the first time, he looked around at the world around him and marveled that he was on another planet. Most humans never left Earth. He had been born there, but had been relocated to Waa as a child. Now he was on his third planet, and he marveled at how different it was from the other two.

Almost all of the differences were caused by Telgora’s rotational axis, he knew. The planet spins on a near-perfect ninety-degree axis, which means it rolls around its sun like a giant marble. The southern hemisphere resides in perpetual daylight—the north, in perpetual dark. At the sun-facing south pole, temperatures remain a constant four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, two hundred degrees Celsius. Temperatures at the bitterly frozen darkness of the northern pole are just the opposite.

As a result of the world being tipped on its side, only the thin band of planet that exists between the two extremes is habitable. That’s where he and all the other living creatures on the planet were currently located—within a roughly ten kilometer-wide ring that circled the entire planet. Here, Telgora is a blend of green, flowing meadow mixed with wide stretches of barren dirt and rock. Orange, deerlike creatures, called
ninal
, roam freely between the meadows and the barren areas and represent the primary source of food and leather for their underground-dwelling cohabitants. Outside of the band, very little survives above ground for long. Native Telgorans—reed-thin, seven-foot tall warriors, with muscles like steel—live most of their lives underground, protected from the often-bitter winds and extreme temperatures that assault most of the planet’s surface.

Eli could quote these and other facts about the planet from memory. He hadn’t spent all of his youth studying only fighting and ancient battles. He had given time to other topics as well, and knowing about the planet where he knew he’d eventually end up only made sense.

Although he considered the rotational axis, and the resulting weather patterns, the most interesting aspects about the planet, he understood—as did everyone in the Shiale Alliance—that the agsel beneath the planet’s surface is what most thought about. Telgora is a remote planet, residing on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. To the casual observer or passerby, it would be deemed unworthy of investigation or consideration, and dismissed as another worthless backwater planet. But the casual passerby might not know that far below the catacombs where the native Telgorans make their homes, expansive deposits of precious agsel ore reside, waiting to be extracted, processed, and shipped off-world. For the majority of the scatted species and races in the universe, the possession of agsel, and the ability to incorporate it into space-worthy craft, represents the difference between being planet-locked or space-able.

Only with the ore is faster-than-light travel possible. This made Telgora anything but worthless.

The human and Minith workers that mine the planet’s ore keep themselves holed up in a series of giant bunkers scattered across the thin, habitable band. Totaling nearly thirty in all, each bunker is a veritable city that provides for the needs of the miners living inside. Hospitals, restaurants, bars, housing, and other necessities—legal or illegal, moral or not—are provided for the inhabitants. Life on the mining planet is tough, and the Leadership Council that has been established to govern Telgora learned early on that concessions were needed to keep workers happy and maintain production. One such concession was segregation. Only the underground communities that held the Leadership Council were fully integrated—home to both Minith and humans alike. All others were not, only housing a single species. Humans and Minith had come to an understanding in the dozen years since the end of the wars, but that understanding didn’t always lead to acceptance or tolerance. Distrust was commonplace among the races. Violence—once a criminal offense for the humans—was becoming more acceptable within the rugged communities so far from Earth.