The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) (14 page)

“Just need them to eat food and stay silent. I’ll guide them through the rest,” Idadu said. “You can really take us all back to Earth?”

“Yes, every last one of you.” Hale opened an IR channel. “Standish, Yarrow, Rohen. Drop your rifles with Gunney and report to my location ASAP.”

“This is most unusual, but we’ll manage. I’ve been in charge for almost ninety years. My village will follow my lead,” Idadu said. “Wait until the girls with the flower petals arrive at the door, then have your men follow them. I’ll have everyone back in their homes before the shuttle arrives. Excuse me.”

He stepped over the old woman and got one step toward the door when Steuben blocked his path.

“Where are my people?” the Karigole asked.

****

Yarrow, Rohen and Standish followed behind a pair of young girls, each holding a basket and sprinkling flower petals before the Marines.  Idadu led them all toward the college. Windows lit up across the village as more and more of the inhabitants awoke. Many stood in their doorways, gawking at the new arrivals.

“Anyone else not like this?” Yarrow asked. His voice box was muted and his words unaltered. They’d heard the elder tell the flower girls that the kadanu high guard spoke a language more pleasing to Mentiq’s ears, and the Marines took the hint.  “We don’t even have our rifles.”

“Just play along,” Standish said. “These folk seem pretty harmless. Worst comes to worst, we’ve got our Ka-Bars and our armor. The old fart’s got them all eating out of his palm.”

“What’re they going to do to us?” Rohen asked.

“Well, if they want a virgin sacrifice…” Standish pointed a finger at Yarrow.

Yarrow tensed and his face went red. “Damn you, Standish.”

A set of heavy doors leading into the college opened ahead of them. Long wooden tables ran the length of an open ballroom; villagers bustled about with trays of food while others swept the floor and picked up bits of trash.

Idadu hurried into the room.

“No one will be anointed this day,” Idadu said loudly. “Lord Mentiq sends his high guard to honor us. Let us welcome them with our finest food and drink.”

The villagers looked puzzled, and many backed away as the three Marines entered the ballroom. Idadu pointed to three high-backed chairs on a slightly raised platform.

Standish did his best to smile and nod, waving to small, tired-eyed children. He took one of the seats, which groaned beneath the weight of his armor.

“What’re we supposed to do?” Rohen asked as he sat next to Standish.

“Smile and nod, boys. Smile and nod,” Standish said.

A side door burst open and three young women came in, carrying trays of food and three wooden cups.

One of the women stopped in front of Standish, her silver-blue hair cut into a bob, her eyes as green as emeralds. Her tray held a hot bowl of cooked grains, a saucer with deep-red seeds and a cup of purple liquid. She gave Standish a coy look and giggled.

“Please, enjoy,” Idadu said.

Standish took the tray with a wink and set it on the wooden armrest.

“OK, let me test this for poison,” Yarrow said as he took out a detection wand from his gauntlet. “Who knows what kind of microbes are—”

Standish took a swig from his cup and popped a handful of seeds into his mouth.

“Wine,” Standish said. “Good too, lots of body with notes of…cardamom and peat. The pomegranate seeds are fantastic. I’m going to turn my box back on, ask this cutie what her name is and tell her she’s got a Marine boyfriend.” He wiggled his eyebrows at the serving girl, who giggled and covered her mouth.

“Don’t do that,” Rohen said. “Let’s play our part and get out of here before we start a riot.”

“Boys, welcome to the Island of Fiki-Fiki,” Standish said.

“What?” Rohen frowned.

“Just eat…and let’s not mention the wine to Lieutenant Hale. Booze is a big no-no while we’re in the field,” Yarrow said. He picked up a spoon full of grains and took a bite. At the end of the ballroom, he got a glimpse of Lilith. She’d retreated to the back wall. She had her arms crossed and pressed tight against her body, her head low. She wiped at her face between deep breaths.

Yarrow kept eating, though he’d lost his appetite.

Egan twisted the IR dish toward the stars and tapped at his gauntlet. Only a few bright stars burned through the red blanket of the distant nebula while Hale and the Marines stood in a small glade. Clicks from alien insects filled the air.

“Should be just a second, sir,” Egan said. “There, got our handshake. You’re secure with the bridge.”

A projection of Captain Valdar came to life in front of Hale, cast from the Egan’s antenna.

“Hale, good to see you. What’s your status?” Valdar asked.

Hale recounted events up until when his Marines went to the welcoming ceremony. Valdar didn’t act overly surprised when Hale told him about the village full of long-lost human beings.

“I’ve got the two elderly villagers in our relocated hide site, sedated. Idadu will keep them under until our mission is complete. My plan is to ambush the kadanu when they arrive at daybreak and use their shuttle to get into Mentiq’s city. From there, we’ll find some way to neutralize the target or get the shields down so you can do it the loud and messy way,” Hale said.

“Decent, but I can’t think of anything better from orbit. How many civilians are there?”

“Three hundred ninety-two at this location, but there’s a catch. Seems there’s a population of Karigole on a nearby island. We don’t know the numbers but I’m sending Steuben and Lafayette and Sergeant Orozco to investigate. They’ll use our cloaked Mule to get to the island.”

“Karigole? That’s…incredible. Something tells me you didn’t have a lot of choice with sending Steuben and the tin man to check it out.” Valdar looked to the side and spoke to someone on the bridge.

“No, they were pretty insistent. I put Orozco on their team to keep me informed with what’s really happening on that island. The Karigole are hard to predict when it comes to Toth. That there’s more of them out here…all bets are off on how rational they’re going to be.”

A crack of thunder broke from behind Hale and Valdar’s projection flickered.

“Crap, that figures. You’ve got a few minutes left until the weather breaks the connection,” Egan said.

“Sir, can we even evac all these civilians? I flew through that mess at the anchorage. There are a lot of hostiles in orbit,” Hale said.

“I’ll worry about the evac. You worry about killing Mentiq. Understand? Need you to get moving faster. Our batteries…” Valdar went fuzzy. “…work around but…hours.” The projection cut out.

Hale looked at Egan, who shook his head.

“Nothing is ever easy, is it?” Hale asked.

“Nope. I can’t help but notice that you left out my battle with the krayt. It isn’t every day that happens to me,” Egan said.

“Marine, if that’s the worst thing that happens to you on this planet, consider yourself lucky,” Hale said.

****

Orozco shifted against the Mule’s co-pilot seat. He’d had to dump his armor plating to fit in the seat, and the bank of blinking buttons that he wasn’t allowed to touch only made him more and more nervous as the flight continued.

“Hey, Lafayette,” he said to the Karigole in the pilot’s seat in front of him, “you really think there’s an island full of your people here?”

“I believe you are attempting small talk.”

“I’m getting bored and there’s this big red button that’s tempting me to push it.”

“Buttons are not toys, Sergeant Orozco. I need you to monitor the capacitor charge levels from the co-pilot’s seat, not send us crashing into the ocean. Speaking of which…”

“Thirty-seven percent.”

“To keep your mind occupied, I refuse to believe that there are more Karigole on this planet. My Centuria and I chased such rumors for years; all proved fruitless. I made my peace that my people will die with Steuben. To believe otherwise is to re-invite suffering that I have already defeated,” Lafayette said.

“If you don’t believe it, then why are you going to the island?”

“Steuben kept the pain. He keeps it out of hope, and that hope is why we are on this fool’s errand. Tell me this: how do you feel knowing that Mentiq maintained a sizable population of humans as livestock?”

Orozco felt a surge of anger in his chest.

“I want to rip his diseased lump of brain matter apart like you two did to that Kren asshole on the
Naga
. How else can I feel?”

“Understandable. Is it true that humans once kept vast tracts of land dedicated to maintaining livestock of their own? How is it you can have so much hatred for Mentiq for behavior similar to your own?”

“What? People aren’t cows or chickens, tin man. Big difference. Have you ever seen a cow before?”

“I observed some outside Phoenix. They were graceful, majestic, with long manes of flowing hair. I understand humans used to ride them into battle.”

“That’s a horse. There are some wild herds ranging between Phoenix and Maricopa. Cows are bigger, dumber animals that crap all over the place.”

“And you would eat these cows?”

“Not for a long time. Back in the twenties some genius invented NuMeat. Tasted identical to beef, chicken or fish, but it was all made from plants. Bunch of meat-lovers swore they could tell the difference between the original and the imitation, but they failed a blind taste test every single time,” Orozco said.

“And humans stopped large-scale meat consumption after this came on the market?”

“Not right away. Thing was, the NuMeat was cheaper—a lot cheaper—to produce and ship. Some of the big fast-food chains switched over and people started buying the NuMeat. Grazing land got turned into farms, lots of meat producers went out of business, price of real meat went up, more people bought the NuMeat. Market forces.

“There were still some people that
had
to have the real thing.  My
abuela
, she wouldn’t touch the fake stuff, made my grandpa spend lots of money on the real thing. But he,” Orozco laughed, “he just bought her the NuMeat and swapped the packaging. Spent the rest of the money on his mistress.”

“You find it amusing that your progenitor was unfaithful?”

“A Spaniard’s heart is like a forest, Lafayette. There’s always room for another tree.”

“I will never understand humans. Prepare to land.”

A small island several miles long crested over the horizon, a mass of fungal trees dark against the water and red sky.

“No sign of any electricity. I’ll set down on the far end,” Lafayette said.

Orozco gripped his armrests as Lafayette nosed the Mule higher over a line of trees then dipped into a small clearing. The Mule landed gently and Lafayette shut the craft down.

“I’ll get the shroud over the ship. Meet me outside,”
Steuben sent.

Orozco got out of the co-pilot’s seat and opened a locker holding his armor plates.

“That won’t be necessary,” Lafayette said. “I doubt there’s anything here.”

“Is there some Karigole equivalent for ‘better safe than sorry’?”

Lafayette cocked his head to the side. “We say, ‘It is more desirable to kill an enemy with your bare hands than from a distance.’”

Orozco shook his head and donned his chest plate.

****

Lilith sat on a wooden bench on the covered patio that ran across the back of the college. She watched as waves crashed against the nearby shore, light from Mentiq’s city shining like a moon frozen against the horizon.

She held her necklace in her lap, her fingers rubbing along the edges. A teardrop fell across the deep-blue jewel in the center.

The sound of heavy footsteps approaching startled her. She sat up straight and wiped her face across her shoulder. The youngest of the Marines, Yarrow, stood in the doorway leading back to the ballroom. He said words that had no meaning for her.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Yarrow touched a box on his throat.

“Sorry, how’s this?” he asked.

“Better. Interesting technology. My aunt worked on something similar for the temple, creating translation protocols for races that Mentiq would contact…” she trailed off and looked over at the distant city. “He wasn’t going to enlighten those races, was he? He was going to consume them, or make them like us—” Her hand flew to her mouth and she dry heaved.

“It’s not every day you get your whole universe upended like this.” Yarrow sat on the bench next to her.

“I don’t think you really understand how I’m feeling right now,” Lilith said.

“Oh? Couple weeks ago I found out that I’m not a real person,” Yarrow said.

Lilith turned to the Marine and pressed her lips into a thin line. She reached out and ran her fingertips down the side of his face and along his jawline.

“You seem plenty real to me,” she said.

“That’s up for interpretation. I’m a proccie, a procedurally generated human being. Ibarra—I’ll explain him later—grew my body in a tube and put my consciousness, which came from some sort of computer simulation, into it. I didn’t even know until Lieutenant Hale told me. Up until a few months ago, everything I thought was my life was a big old fat lie.” Yarrow put his hands on the edge of the bench and leaned back.

“Why? Did this Ibarra create you to be…livestock?”

“No. That’s what the Toth want me and the other proccies to be. That’s why they attacked Earth. I guess Ibarra made me to fight the Xaros. There weren’t many of us left after the invasion, and the drones will come back…can’t say I blame him.” Yarrow shrugged.

“No one asks to be born,” Lilith said. “At least you have a sense of agency with your life. You haven’t been tricked into a belief system like me. You do have the choice to be a Marine? To fight?”

“Do I?” Yarrow looked across the ocean. “I never thought about it. Not that there’s anything else to do on Earth. Everyone is focused on rebuilding the planet and surviving the next wave.”

“You know what’s odd?” Lilith sat forward and tugged at her bottom lip. “One of the younger students, a biology savant, received his calling the last time the kadanu came to see us. He was to figure out a way to accelerate human growth. Fetus to adult within days. He was so excited for the challenge, decades of work ahead of him…”

“Sounds like Mentiq farmed out—sorry, phrasing—a lot of projects to this village. What did he have you do?”

“Cracking an ancient device’s source code. Several generations of our scientists have worked on the device. First, we trained it to do simple things like utility management, then progressively more advanced computations for energy shielding and quantum field calculations for jump engines…” She looked to Mentiq’s city. “He must have it there. The energy shields are only a few hundred years old. It didn’t exist until my ancestor completed his calling for the shields.”

“Is everyone in this village as brilliant as you are?” Yarrow asked.

Lilith blushed. “No. We’re tested throughout childhood for aptitude and ability. Those that aren’t gifted in any particular area are…taken to the city. Some become kadanu. Most are never seen again.”

“And you…you know this ancient device well? Can you operate it?”

“Hmm…I suppose. I’d need direct access. My lab is firewalled off from the island network. I could only share code with researchers in the temple or on the other islands,” she said.

“One second.” Yarrow switched off his voice box and opened a channel to Hale. “Sir?”

“Go,”
Hale said.

“It’s Lilith. When we go to Mentiq’s city, I think we need to take her with us.” Yarrow conferred with his lieutenant for a minute as Lilith tried to listen in.

“What’s that all about?” she asked once Yarrow reactivated his voice box.

“Lilith…do you know how to fight?” he asked.

“You mean,” her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “violence?”

Yarrow nodded.