Stellarnet Rebel (20 page)

A sickly green-skinned fey-wight answered with the colonel’s voice. “We’re trying to hold off a Tikati onslaught. They’re attacking all four hangars in Sectors C, K, O and W, and parked their asses on Sector M.”

Duin slipped a coil of chain over his shoulder. The chain was attached to a handle about the length of his forearm. On the other end was a small spiked hook. It was a metal version of a hunting weapon known as a
wurak
on Glin.

Through his bracer, he could hear a cacophony of screaming and mayhem, including the sharp retort of projectile weapons. Meanwhile, the ever-present reverberation shook the colony. The garden’s back door wouldn’t open with his key or access code. Duin zapped the control panel and the door opened.

“Duin?” This was J’ni’s voice, coming from his bracer. He could barely hear her. On his arm, he saw the image of a Glin who looked like J’ni but lacked human ears, hair, or her intricate tattooed eyebrow designs. Instead, she had viridian-colored skin on the back of her head and neck, and a face so pale it almost glowed. He guessed it was a Glin incarnation programmed by Hax, in case J’ni ever wanted to play Mysteria.

“Are you alright?” Duin had to zap the next door to get into the 50s thoroughfare. The corridor was darker than usual, and the dim walls lacked any markers, maps, ads or directions. A few blocks down, someone was yelling that the data keys didn’t work. Other colonists ran past him, futilely trying to get their devices to connect to the Asternet.

“I’m trying to get out. The Tikati are everywhere and—” Another wave of noise drowned out her words.

“I’m coming,” he said as he ran. “Belloc and I are both on our way.”

Over more screaming and unidentifiable sounds, Duin caught the words “egg vendor near Sector H.”

“I’m with a squad of UN PKs right below the Colony Square,” said Belloc’s incarnation, the connection to him still open on Duin’s arm. “We’re coming up the N-side stairwell.” Belloc was much closer to J’ni’s location than Duin was.

Great Ocean
, Duin prayed,
protect her until Belloc can get there.

“’Lo, Duin.” This time, the voice wasn’t coming from his bracer. It came from a very young female running toward him. Her white hair was heavily decorated with wires and other bits which bounced as she ran, and she carried a contraption of polished metal, lights, and what looked like leather and glass. She was followed by five other humans who had some unusual-looking backpacks, electroshock poles, guns, gloves and flashing Mysteria T-shirts. One carried a sword.

“Looking for group?” she called to Duin.

“I’m going to get J’ni,” he said without stopping. “She was in the market when Tikat attacked.”

“You can see everything from the Tech Center. C’mon, that’s where we’re going.” She touched her glove and the door opened to the R-42 stairwell. It was a straight shot from there to the Tech Center. If she could open hallways, it would be faster than if Duin had to zap his way through. And if the emergency walls in the thoroughfares started closing up on him, he’d be stuck completely. Assuming the live feeds still worked as she said, he could locate J’ni and Belloc, then meet up with them, hopefully killing several Tikati along the way.

Duin changed course and followed the gamers.

“Sucks meeting again like this,” the female said to Duin as they ran to the 40s thoroughfare.

“I can’t recall meeting before.”

They crossed the thoroughfare to the opposite stairwell.

In the R-32 hallway, there were several colonists, residents of the block, who peppered them with questions.

“What’s going on?”

“Can you get on the Asternet?”

“How did you open the door? We couldn’t get out.”

The white-haired female touched her glove again and they entered the next stairwell. The colonists followed them, until she opened the door to the 30s thoroughfare and was met with jets of flame, terrified shrieks and a horrific smell. The colonists quickly retreated to their compartments.

Duin squeezed his eyes shut as the fire’s afterimage stained his vision.

“You good, Duin?” she asked.

One of her companions stuck his head through the doorway, looking up and down the thoroughfare. “I’ve got a line of sight on eight mobs, heading east from our position, armed with zippos.”

“Awesome.” She turned a knob on her weapon and it made a hissing noise. “Any suggestions, your Glinness?”

“Don’t get burned,” said Duin in a strained voice.
J’ni is not afraid of fire
, he reminded himself. The vivid, nightmarish thought of her being killed by a Tikati flamethrower made his anger surge until it drowned out his fear. His zap-sword crackled.

“Any suggestions, other than the obvious?” she replied.

“Stand back.” Duin pushed through the doorway. Melted control panels, sparking wires and the still-burning bodies of colonists stretched out to his right. The Tikati were to his left, less than a block away, systematically burning and destroying anything or anyone they could find.

Lifting their weapons, the gamers fanned out behind Duin. They were spotted by the Tikati rearguard, which chattered in its clicking language. Several sets of flickering eyes turned and looked at Duin. These Tikati were not in
bavat
, and they did not have the human-like visage of Kitik. Their eyes glowed, but their plated heads were tilted back to reveal enormous mouths lined with sharp teeth. What looked like body armor was actually their own skin, hardened by millenniums of living under the conditions of Tikat.

“Don’t let their appearance frighten you,” Duin said.

“No prob,” said the gamer with the sword.

Then the Tikati transformed. The necks, arms and legs of each creature telescoped into long, segmented, insectlike limbs, expanding until the creatures filled the entire height and width of the corridor.

“Mother of god,” said the swordsman.

“Don’t worry, they are easy to kill.” Shrugging the chain off of his shoulder, he let it slide down his arm, uncoiling and ringing when it hit the metal floor. Duin caught the handle in his hand.

“How the hell you figure?” said another gamer, who wielded a shock pole and had the Mysteria logo shaved into her glowing magenta hair.

Duin lifted his zap-sword. It crackled with lightning and illuminated the malice in his eyes. “I’ve killed them before.”

He spread his arms, waving the zap-sword and the chain whip. Beckoning, he called out, “Come, try to relocate
this
Glin!”

The two Tikati nearest to him released streams of flame. Duin lunged forward and swung his
wurak
, which spiraled around one of the flamethrowers. He yanked, disarming the Tikati, then hit its leg with his zap-sword. The sword crackled and the creature stumbled forward, falling to the ground dead.

The gamers with the odd backpacks shot streams of white chemicals, dousing the flames. The white-haired female used her weapon—which turned out to be a laser gun. A thin orange line shot over Duin’s head.

Duin dodged another jet of flame and bounded right into the middle of the Tikati, spinning his chain. It crackled with bio-electricity, like his sword. All he needed to do was connect with any one of their segmented limbs, and the zap would kill them.

Between Duin, the leader with the laser gun, and the assistance of the dousers, several Tikati went down within seconds. The last two crawled over the bodies of their cohorts to get to Duin. He swung the chain whip, catching one of their flamethrowers, and pulled, trying to drag his enemy into the range of his swinging zap-sword. In this tug-of-war, flames roared from the Tikati’s weapon and swept across Duin. Duin yelled and twisted, snapping the flamethrower and the Tikati’s arm off entirely. His zap-sword connected and the creature shuddered and fell. The gamers finished off the remaining Tikati.

Duin looked at himself and realized he wasn’t burned. The military-issue suit resisted fire as well as bullets, electricity and radiation.

“What’d they drop?” asked one of the gamers with a douser.

“Just their zippos,” said the sword-wielding gamer.

“Moving on.” The white-haired female touched her glove and opened the stairwell into block R-22. “Duin takes point, he’s the tank.”

Duin led the way into the connecting hallway. “And who are you, exactly?”

“Nik.”

“J’ni’s former blockmate Nik? We thought you were male. And either dead or nefarious. Are you nefarious?”

“Sometimes. But I didn’t kaboom the block, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Then how did you survive?”

“I wasn’t there,” she said. “I was with Hax.”

“But, they l’upped your locator and couldn’t find you,” said Duin.

“I always left that locator in my compartment. It was destroyed.”

As they entered the Tech Center, Nik slung her weapon over her shoulder. Duin coiled his
wurak
. They passed a Hax with purple hair and another with green. When they reached a Hax with long black hair, Nik kissed him.

“Look who I found,” she said. “He says Genny might be trapped in the market.”

“Let’s see.” Hax examined the wall. Every inch of wall space was covered with windows. Most of them appeared to be live feeds of the colony, including cameras that showed the battle raging between the Tikati and the Earth forces, in the skies above Asteria.

Duin searched for a feed from Sector M. “I thought the Asternet wasn’t working.”

“Affirmative, the Asternet is down,” said the black-haired Hax. “But the Haxnet servers are in Level Zero, where the Tikati can’t get them.”

“There’s a Level Zero?”

Hax pointed down. “Underneath Asteria Colony. All part of my diabolical plan to overthrow the military-industrial complex if it ever becomes too oppressive. Also good for naps when I’m s’posed to be working. But alien attack trumps secret lair.”

The tech wiggled his finger, causing several windows to move across the wall. Some of the windows were black—the netcams not working. When Hax spread his hands in the air, one of the windows enlarged until it filled the wall from floor to ceiling, creating a life-sized image of the horrific scene in the Colony Square. Tikati were entering through a hole in the ceiling, and all of the thoroughfares had been closed off in an attempt to contain the threat. But as Duin and the others knew, some Tikati had managed to get out into the rest of the colony.

Duin picked Belloc out of the chaos by his fluid, agile movements and the back of his dark blue head. The word
SELKIE-2
floated in white letters above him.

Hax touched a device in his ear. “Hey, Mario, the princess is hiding behind the pipe twenty feet to your left.”

“Princess?” Then Duin saw her. J’ni was flat on the floor, wedged alongside one of the large pipes that crossed the open area of the market. Letters above her said
BL0GG1RL
. She wasn’t moving.

Dodging the crossfire of the Tikati, the Earth military, a few gamers and the colony police, Belloc jumped over pipes and debris to reach her. His
wallump
suit was torn and singed beyond repair. Areas of exposed skin on his torso, arm and thigh were burned.

“How is he breathing in there?” asked Nik.

The Tikati were used to such conditions. The human cops and troops had spacesuits. There was obviously oxygen, as indicated by the flames, but the air was thick with toxic fumes and black clouds of smoke that billowed from burning bodies and smoldering plastic.

“He’s holding his breath.” Duin’s eyes remained glued to the window. “Glin can do that a long time.”

A jet of fire flared in J’ni’s direction, and Belloc threw his body over hers. One of the UN peacekeepers launched a short-range rocket into the chest of the Tikati with the flamethrower.

Duin yelled into the Mysteria com-channel on his bracer.

“Belloc, is she alive? Belloc!”

J’ni felt the searing heat of the Tikati flames, then someone shielded her back. A glimpse of his gloves through her stinging eyes identified her protector, and her terror was replaced by relief. She heard Duin’s voice but couldn’t answer. Holding her shawl against her mouth and nose, she struggled to continue breathing.

Belloc peered over the pipe, then he helped her to her feet. Most of the fight was on the other side of the center and Tikati had stopped coming in through the ceiling.

She could hear Hax’s voice through Belloc’s glove. “You need to get out of there. If one of those Tikati ships decides to take off, you’re going to lose the rest of the air. I’ll open the doors for you.”

They ran. Within a few strides of the stairwell, it opened for them and clanged shut again as soon as they were over the threshold. The door on the opposite side of the stairwell opened and they entered the H-97 hallway. They didn’t stop until they were in the 90s thoroughfare.

Belloc fell back against the wall. J’ni collapsed in his arms, exhausted and shaken.

She felt his chest expand with great gulps of air.

“I didn’t…breathe…for over—” he glanced at his glove, “—fifteen minutes.”

“You’re the lucky one.” Talking sent her into a coughing fit, and he held her until it passed. She saw the holes in his suit and patches of blistered and blackened skin. A gash, dark with blood, crossed his right shoulder and there was another on the side of his leg.

“We should go to the med-block.” She wheezed. “It’s not far.”

Duin’s voice spoke through the Mysteria app on her bracer. “J’ni, my love, while tenacity and compassion are some of your most admirable qualities, I am prepared to ask Belloc to carry you kicking and screaming straight to Aileen’s.”

Belloc shrugged his good shoulder and nodded his head in agreement. “You’ll be safer there.”

She cleared her throat, but her voice was still hoarse. “Where are you?” she asked Duin.

“In the Tech Center.”

Duin explained how he could see her on the netcams from there. He also told her that three large Tikati ships had landed on top of Sector M and cut their way in, while a barrage of smaller enemy vessels kept the Air & Space Force busy outside. Via the Colony Square, bands of Tikati were ravaging the thoroughfares of Asteria.

Belloc said, “We should move.” But in spite of his suggestion, he didn’t move. She was still resting against him.

J’ni didn’t want to move. As always, Belloc was the eye of the hurricane, and she wanted another moment there. But she knew it couldn’t last too long. She straightened and took his hand, heading to Sector I, back into the storm.

She spoke into her bracer. “Hax, if your servers are working, does that mean you can reach the Stellarnet and let Earth know what’s happening? Can I send vids to INC?”

“The Tikati ganked our satellites,” said Hax. “The military has a few hidden communication stations. But without the orbital enhancers, the signal is weak at best and will take forever to get there.”

Just ahead, at the border between Sectors H and I, the thoroughfare was blocked by a wall. As J’ni and Belloc approached, a gap opened to let them pass and immediately closed again behind them. They hadn’t gone a block when they were stopped by a group of colonists armed with shock poles, high-tech crossbows and conventional projectile weapons.

Belloc stepped protectively between J’ni and the others.

“How in the hell did you get in?” A man in a blood-spattered, knitted sweater pointed his gun at them. He was as tall as Belloc but twice as wide.

“Are you going to shoot us, Brendan?” Belloc asked. Brendan was a bodhrán player who arrived on Asteria a few weeks before. J’ni recognized him from the music sessions.

“Should I put you out of your misery? What the hell happened to you?”

They told him what they knew about the Colony Square, the Tikati attack, and how she and Belloc reached Sector I.

Then Brendan told his own story.

“We shut the entire sector off from the rest of the colony when the Asternet went down. A few of those things got in, though, before we finished the job. We took care of them, but we’re still on guard.”

J’ni didn’t bother asking how they sealed off the sector without the benefit of the Asternet or the cooperation of the Asteria police. She imagined they had their ways, the way Hax had his own shenanigans.

Aileen’s was headquarters, hospital, arsenal and auditorium. Musicians played while patrols exchanged information and those who normally served pints were dispensing weapons or preparing med supplies. She noticed that Seth was there, too, helping Owen sort munitions on a long row of tables down the middle of the room. She wondered why he wasn’t in the military zone. He must have been here when everything was locked down.

“We’re in the pub,” she reported over the channel to Duin.

“Good.” He sounded rushed. “Stay close to Belloc. Please.”

“The colonel says some of his military ships shifted to the Solar System.” This was Hax, on Belloc’s glove. “So, Earth should know wassup. Hopefully, they’ll send reinforcements and several oxygen tankers. The colony is ass for air, with everything leaking and burning.”

Belloc collapsed in a chair and drank water like he was dying of thirst, and then drank some more. “I wish I was home, in the fish pond.” He poured water on his wounds and was soon surrounded by a growing puddle of water dripping from wet cloths draped over his injuries.

“You had a fish pond on Glin?”

“At home in our garden, J’ni.”

“Oh, right.” Whenever Duin talked of home, he meant Glin. It reminded her how bad Belloc’s life must have been, for him to prefer Asteria. She examined his shoulder. “This one isn’t like the other burns.”

“A bullet I couldn’t avoid.”

“I hope it doesn’t scar your beautiful skin.”

“Beautiful?” He sounded surprised.

“Of course. I’ve always thought so. You’re like a jewel.” She saw the look of confusion on his face. “A jewel is a kind of treasure.”

“Yes, I’ve seen them in Mysteria, but…” His voice trailed off, and then he began again in Glinnish.
“But I did not choose the color of my skin. It doesn’t seem right to be either hated, or admired, for something in which I had no choice.”

“I admire your choices, too. You didn’t have to risk your life to save me, but you did.” J’ni had never been so close to death before. When she’d been in the stairwell with Duin, when she was trying to escape from Asteria, even when she had gone to the Tikati compound on Glin, she had never been so terrified as when those monstrous creatures began pouring into the market and burning everything. Duin had told her that the Tikati were not as they appeared. She didn’t realize he meant it literally.

“Duin would have saved you, if I didn’t.”

“And Duin wouldn’t be here, either, without you. I owe you so much. I owe you everything.”

“Now you know how I felt when you saved me from Ga’Duhn.”

“Do my hands belong to
you
, now?”

She smiled. But she should have known better than to joke about that. Belloc took his oath to her very seriously.

He grasped her wrist. His handsome, angular features were a dark storm of intensity. It looked like he was going to say something, but Hax’s voice spoke again, through the Mysteria app in her bracer and Belloc’s glove.

“Status update. They’re spawning in Sector W and moving through Sectors Q, R and S. Most of the thoroughfares have been sealed off, but they’ve got some kind of plasma torch they’re using to cut through.”

“What do we do now?” She was looking at Belloc, but Hax was the one who replied.

“At the moment, I’ve got Duin taking aggro and pulling them through my lasers.”

She peered at her bracer. “He’s doing what?”

A window opened on her forearm. It showed Duin running down one of the thoroughfares, pursued by several Tikati. He was wearing the borrowed military uniform, but it looked like the digital United States insignia had been replaced with glowing Mysteria logos. As he passed the netcam, a red grid flashed across the corridor, shredding the Tikati to pieces when their own momentum propelled them through the beams.

J’ni began trembling and Belloc put his hand over her forearm, covering the vid.

“Hax, don’t show her any more,” Belloc told the tech. Then he spoke soothingly to J’ni. “Don’t worry. Duin is very good at killing Tikati.”

“I know.” But she couldn’t hold back the tears. Gruesome images replayed in her mind, and there was no way to close the windows of her thoughts. The smells of the market attack still lingered in her nostrils. Her mouth tasted like ash and other things she did not want to taste.

J’ni wasn’t trying to be a hero when she stopped Ga’Duhn. Duin didn’t want to be the Envoy of the Freedom Council—he would rather be on Glin with his family than racing flamethrowers and laser beams. Belloc risked his life to remove her from the heart of a war zone. Blaze risked his career to get her off of Asteria.

They were all just individuals who found themselves in a position to make a choice: to act or to allow evil to happen. But J’ni wasn’t sure how much more she could do, or how much more she could handle.

It didn’t matter that she knelt in water, or that his wet bandages were soaking her. It didn’t seem to matter to him that she couldn’t avoid touching his injuries. He held her, his head bent over hers, his face in her hair, as she cried into his chest. She recalled the day she’d met Belloc, and remembered his terror and his helplessness. Now she felt terrified and helpless.

“Get your webbed hands off of her,” snarled a voice she hardly recognized through its venomous hatred.

J’ni lifted her eyes and saw Seth aiming a rifle at the back of Belloc’s head. Belloc turned his head to see over his shoulder.

“Don’t look at me.” Seth thrust the barrel of the gun at the base of Belloc’s skull. “Don’t you move. And don’t try any of your goddamn frog-jitsu on me.”

Voices fell silent throughout the pub. Even the musicians stopped playing.

Belloc spoke softly in Glinnish.
“Get away from me, J’ni.”

“Meh,”
she answered, rising to her feet. “
Meh! Nizi glaw pud. Seth, put the gun down.”

She reached for the gun and Belloc repeated more sharply in Glinnish,
“Get away from me.”
He didn’t move, but she felt him pushing her away all the same.

“Shut up!” Seth yelled at him. “You’re the reason we’re under attack.” He jabbed hard at Belloc’s head with the barrel of the gun. Belloc didn’t flinch, but J’ni did.

“Stop it,” she demanded.

“Move, Genny, I don’t want to hurt you.”

Owen stood about five feet away, off to her left. “What’s your plan, MacGowan? You want to blow his blue brains all over your woman there, or do you have something else in mind?”

Her chest constricted and a lump formed in her throat, choking her words. “Owen, no.”

“We take this one and give it to the Tikati,” said Seth. “Then we lead them to the other one. Genny knows where it is.”

Her face was solid disgust and defiance. “I won’t help you do a damn thing.”

Belloc’s eyes swept the pub, taking in Owen, Brendan, Aileen and the others, and all of their guns and weapons. J’ni knew how many Glin it took to drag Belloc to Sala’s hut. How many humans would it take to drag him to the Tikati? And she wouldn’t be able to render a judgment to save him this time. If they didn’t shoot him first.

“We do that, then
all
of the aliens are gone,” said Seth. “Problem solved.”

Owen shook his head. “No, boyo. We still have a problem. I have a problem with any bastard who thinks he knows better than everyone else, demanding we agree with him at the end of a gun.”

Aileen spoke up. “Especially in my pub. Belloc, like anyone here, is my guest and under my protection.”

“Slane?” Seth called to the fiddler. “Back me up here.”

“Fuck off, MacGowan. That lad’s one of the best musicians I ever met. I’ll not help you.”

The look on Belloc’s face turned from grim resignation to amazement as he realized that he might not have to fight for his life after all.

“Can I jump in here?” This was Hax. “I’d like to ask Judas why he went to see the Tikati liaison, before it left Asteria.”

A vid appeared on her bracer showing Seth in the hangar with Kitik’s ship. It was archived at about the same time Duin went to meet with the arms dealers.

J’ni held out her forearm. “How do you explain that?”

Seth watched it for a few moments, his face a sneer. “It’s a fake vid. There’s no netcam in that location.”

“That
you
know of.” Hax chortled, “Muah-ha-ha.”

“I know every netcam in the colony.”

Seth was one of the people responsible for installing and maintaining them. The thought chilled her. “Do you also know the netcams in the Colony Square that never recorded Duin? Or the ones around my block that went on the glitch before my compartment blew up?”

“He was lurking near your block a lot after your epic break up,” Hax said.

Seth shifted in agitation, but he didn’t lower the gun. “I was keeping an eye on you, Genny. I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to help all of us.”

“By betraying us to the Tikati? By giving them the information they needed to destroy the colony’s satellites and the Asternet?” J’ni wanted very much to kick Seth in the face again.

“No, I had nothing to do with this attack. I found out about the arms deal and that’s what I told them. That’s all I told them. The Tikati got what they wanted, they arrested the frog, and they would have left us alone. But then you had to go and piss them off.”

Belloc drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. When she looked into his eyes, what she saw there made her step away.

With inhuman speed, Belloc stood up, grasped the barrel of the gun, and sent a zap coursing down the metal, even as he slammed the butt of the rifle into Seth’s face. Seth dropped like a sack of rocks.

Aileen bent over a moaning Seth. “Oh, hush. You’re lucky he didn’t kill you dead.”

Belloc handed the rifle to Owen.

“Brendan. Get that one,” Owen thrust his chin at Seth. “Give him the
céad míle fuck-off
and toss him outside the perimeter. Maybe his Tikati friends will help him to the military zone, or Sector Z.”