The resistance, p.11
The Resistance, page 11
The cafeteria was empty of menials at that hour, but nevertheless it was brightly lit, so there was no missing the defensive line of Dom standing three-deep in front of the service wik leading up to the higher floors. They seemed determined to deny the Resistance fighters access to the Thuvien at all costs.
But the humans were not to be denied. They immediately opened fire on the Dom who stood in their way. The Dom went down quickly, even as human soldiers crumpled under withering laser blasts and invisible zam bursts that dropped dozens in their tracks. The battle was intense but the math simple: hundreds of soldiers versus dozens of Dom meant the Dom were quickly overwhelmed.
“Stay here,” Kaley ordered Twyla. “You’re in charge of making sure all of our troops get up to the first floor, okay? The Phant number for “one” is eya. Tell them to say eya and the wik will take them there. Once they’ve all made it up to the first floor, you come up too. Got it?”
Twyla nodded. “Try not to get killed without me. I’d hate that.”
Kaley stepped over several Phant bodies and onto a service wik, beckoning others to join her until no more could fit. Twyla directed others onto adjacent wik until all were filled to capacity. Then Kaley nodded to Twyla and spoke the word “eya,” and up they rose.
As soon as they reached the first floor, she and her fellow soldiers were hit with withering laser fire. They returned fire with bullets of their own. Half of her comrades died in those first few seconds, but the other half, including Kaley herself, who had been pressed up against the side of the wik by some invisible force she couldn’t begin to understand, flung themselves off the wik and into the main passageway, firing nonstop.
The other wik arrived seconds later. Out poured dozens of rampaging Resistance fighters, shooting at anyone who stood in their path. The Dom were mowed down in a matter of seconds, and the Resistance suddenly found themselves in possession of the main passageway on the first floor of the Thuvien.
“Make sure this floor is fully secure,” Kaley ordered one of her lieutenants, “then proceed with securing the second and third floors. Keep working your way up until you reach the twentieth floor. I expect you’ll meet little or no resistance past the third floor—it’ll be mostly civilians beyond that point. Phants are to be taken prisoner, not killed, unless they’re trying to kill you. Got it?” Her lieutenant nodded, ordering her soldiers to fan out across the floor.
Kaley took a few moments to catch her breath as more soldiers continued to arrive from below. “You’re with me,” she told them, even though most were not of her wolf pack.
Twyla was the last to arrive. “I left a handful down below to protect our rear,” Twyla informed her. “It wasn’t exactly what you ordered, but it seemed to make sense.”
“Good thinking, Twyla—that’s why I trust you. Now let’s get going.”
Kaley gestured to the soldiers around her to follow her, then headed down the main passageway towards their ultimate goal: the secure wik and the restricted floors. Assuming the wik wand worked as Rachel had promised, the secure wik should whisk them straight up to the top floor of the Thuvien, where the High Council awaited.
Chapter 34
What’s the situation?” Imwe demanded of Glik, his Head of Security.
“Not good,” Glik replied over the videocom with imperturbable calm. “We’re in trouble. The force field is down—no idea how or why. Our bombing campaign killed maybe half of the mjinga but didn’t stop them altogether. Five hundred or so are on the outside, pinned down by our bots. Another five hundred or so made their way onto the ship. They breached our defenses and entered the Mekt through the southern entrance. They made it to the menial cafeteria and took the service wik up to the first floor, where they are now rampaging out of control. I’ve shut down the secure wik, so they have no access to the top ten floors, but otherwise they have free reign of the first twenty floors. We don’t have enough Dom to stop them.”
“Where is the main contingent of their army right now?” Imwe demanded, trying to mirror Glik’s calm demeanor, but inside he felt nothing but panic at this grim recital of events.
“Most appear to be heading for the secure wik on the first floor,” replied Glik. “Why, I can’t say. After Salesh, they should know better: they can’t gain access that way.”
Imwe stared at his Head of Security in frustration. “But how is this happening? Any of it? How are they doing this? How did they disrupt our force field when it was in lockdown mode?”
“No idea,” answered Glik, “but that is not important right now. What is important is that they are here, inside our city, and we are unable to stop them.”
Imwe noticed a face hovering in the background of the video screen. “Is that Zed?”
Glik turned around, saw Zed, and frowned. “Yes, it is.”
“Send him up here at once.”
Glik’s frown deepened, but he nodded and ordered Zed to head up to the thirtieth floor. Zed could be seen heading towards the secure wik, which continued to function on the top ten floors, despite having been programmed to no longer descend to the first floor, for obvious reasons.
“I suggest you set the auto-destruct,” the imperturbable Glik said. He might as well have been talking about setting a dinner timer.
“What? Destroy our own city?”
“Only as a last resort. Set it to activate after a short voice command, in case the worst should happen. Better to lose one city-ship than see a starship fall into the hands of the mjinga.”
“But…”
“The mjinga cannot have access to even one starship, nor can they be permitted to get their hands on the sensitive information contained in the secure library. That much should be obvious.”
“It seems to me they must already have it,” observed a different Council member, one Iwu by name. “There is no way they accomplished this without inside help. It seems Zed’s talk of a spy in our midst must have been true. Whether that spy is a menial gone rogue or Zed’s own mzaz, it hardly matters. What matters is that someone has helped the mjinga, or else they would not be capable of threatening our city’s very existence, would they?”
Zed appeared at the secure wik entry, all nine feet of him. Even the guards standing sentry to either side were dwarfed by his presence. Walking with measured steps towards the High Council, he stopped just short of the conference table. “How may I be of assistance?”
“You can find your mzaz, for starters,” Imwe growled. “And that mjinga of yours you keep talking about—what was her name again?”
“Lim 127.”
“Yes, her too. Find her! And find Hun! If either one of them had anything to do with this, I will wring their necks with my bare hands.”
The other Council members fidgeted in their seats: it was an outrageous statement for any Phant to make, no matter how dire the situation.
“I would love nothing more than to find them,” Zed replied evenly, “but we have been searching for them for some time now and haven’t discovered a single trace of either one of them. Perhaps they were blown to bits during the bombing campaign, or perhaps they found some way through the force field—even though that should have been impossible for the mjinga.”
“If they aren’t somewhere inside Kapela, then how do you explain all this?” Imwe waved his arms around as if to encompass the entire mjinga invasion of their home.
“Like Commander Glik, I haven’t the faintest idea, but this situation reminds me more than I would like of Salesh. The mjinga managed to find a way onto the restricted floors there, despite our best efforts to stop them.”
“Set the auto-destruct, Imwe,” Iwu said. “Just in case.” A chorus of High Council voices concurred.
“Oh, very well,” Imwe said crossly. He tapped at the control panel inset into the conference table in front of him, then spoke a lengthy series of voice commands. A computerized voice spoke back periodically.
“There. It’s done,” he said. “But why it should be necessary when we have control of the entire top third of the Thuvien, where all of the command and control functions are, is beyond me.”
At that very instant, as if on cue, Kaley and Twyla and a dozen others of her wolf pack appeared at the entry to the thirtieth floor.
Chapter 35
The Council members jumped up from their seats in astonishment. Kaley and Twyla zammed the two guards standing sentry to either side. They never had a chance, such was their surprise—and that surprise was mirrored on the faces of every member of the High Council, who stood there staring at the mjinga with mouths agape.
An insistent buzzing came from the videocom, followed by Commander Glik’s usually calm voice speaking in urgent tones. “We have an intrusion,” he warned. “They’ve breached the—“ But he got no further than that, as Kaley strode forward and pointed her gun at the videocom and shot it to smithereens. Her bullets splintered the conference table, leaving an ugly gash in its pristine surface. All ten of the High Council members jumped back in alarm.
There was no controlling these barbarians!
Imwe stared at the defunct videocom. The last image it had shown was of human troops storming onto Security, even as Commander Glik turned away from the videocom in surprise.
Kaley’s wolf pack surrounded the High Council members, even as more mjinga poured off the secure wik. Zed stared at them in astonishment, like everyone else, before letting loose with an incoherent roar and physically tackling the nearest mjinga. All nine feet of him landed on the poor woman, who grunted in pain as her gun went off. A stream of bullets almost hit Zed but missed, pinging instead off the transparent domed ceiling before ricocheting and embedding themselves in the floor. Whatever the transparent ceiling was made of, it obviously wasn’t glass, because the bullets left no mark.
It took four wolf pack members to drag Zed off the woman, and Twyla thwacked him across the head with the butt of her gun for good measure. That finally shut Zed up. He stood seething in silence, Twyla’s gun poking him hard in the small of his back, which was as high as she could reach on the impossibly tall Phant.
Kaley strode over to where Imwe had been sitting just moments before and pushed a button on the table’s console. All ten access panels closed shut.
“The city is now ours,” she said to Imwe in English. Imwe, of course, had no idea what she was saying. “Even as we speak, our soldiers are taking control of Order and Security and Command—and without those top three floors of the Thuvien, you know and I know your people are defenseless. Surrender now, or die.”
She turned to her translator, one Marta by name, who translated her words into Phant.
Imwe remained silent for some time. His mouth moved wordlessly. Finally he grated out a series of nonsense words. Seconds later, a computer voice spoke back.
Marta stared at Imwe in confusion.
“What did he just say?” Kaley demanded.
“I have no idea,” Marta answered. “It was just gibberish.”
“The auto-destruct sequence was just set,” Zed snarled in Phant, earning him another jab in the back with the muzzle of Twyla’s gun. Kaley was no expert in Phant body language, but it seemed to her Zed suddenly looked more relaxed and confident than he had moments before. She certainly didn’t understand his words until Marta translated them for her.
Kaley turned towards Imwe. “Turn it off,” she ordered him in English.
Apparently no translation was needed. “No,” Imwe responded in Phant. “We cannot let you have this ship. It is out of the question. If you and your troops want to live before the ship destroys itself, you had better start running. It will not be a small explosion.”
Marta translated. But instead of running, Kaley stood there pondering what to do next. It looked like the Phants wanted to play a game of chicken—and if so, they had chosen to play with the wrong person.
Chapter 36
I’m going to tell you something even I’m not supposed to know,” Elena confided in Hun as they made their way back towards Hun’s home near Salesh-that-was.
They had decided to forego Kapela altogether. The fighting outside the city walls had only grown more fierce, and it showed no signs of abating anytime soon. Hun had begged her to return home under cover of darkness, now that the force field that had trapped them was gone. He insisted they would be safer there, and in the end Elena had agreed, in no small part because the thought of Hun walking home on his own seemed like a recipe for disaster.
Now dawn was approaching and they had been walking for several hours. It was that early hour of the morning when all was dark and cool, even in July. Since most of the walkways to the south had been destroyed, they’d had to pick their way southeast until they had found one that still functioned. They had taken it to the edge of where the dome had stood until just a few hours ago. There, the vegetation changed abruptly from luminous, fernlike trees to deciduous, leafy ones, demarcating the dome’s edge even without the dome itself being present. The sounds of battle had long since disappeared behind them as they entered the cover of Earth’s native trees.
“Josh let slip something to me he probably shouldn’t have,” Elena confessed. “But you know how it is when two people are… well, you know…sleeping together.”
“Actually, I don’t,” Hun responded. “How is it?”
“Well…you tell each other stuff. Secret stuff. You confide in each other. And one of the things Josh confided in me had to do with the comm systems. But Hun, you have to swear to keep this a secret. Josh would kill me if he knew I’d told you. Not even most Resistance leaders know.”
Hun held his right hand up in solemn human fashion and said, “I swear. Do you want me to pinky swear as well?”
Elena laughed. “No, a regular swear is good enough. Okay, so here’s the secret: we already have one of your comm systems.”
Hun looked flummoxed. “Excuse me?”
She repeated herself. “We already have one of your comm systems. We disassembled it and took it with us when we left Salesh. You know, before Salesh blew up.”
“Ahh!”
Hun was so surprised he stopped walking altogether. “How deviously human of you! No Phant ever would have thought of doing such a thing! Not after both sides had formally agreed to leave the city-ship behind so neither side could possess it.”
“Well…we decided to possess a little of it.”
Hun shook his head and started walking again. “You humans are so cunning it’s frightening. You seem to delight in breaking the rules, no matter whose rules they are.”
“That we do. In any case, the reason I’m telling you this is because I had time to think while I was being held captive by the Phants. That is, before they gave me the chepfu. After that, all I could do was talk and talk and talk—but before that I had plenty of time to think—and it struck me that we could use that secret comm system of ours to sow disinformation among the Phants.”
“Disinformation?” Hun asked, sounding confused.
“Lies, Hun. We could tell the Phants lies—convincing ones they might believe. Lies that might hasten their departure from Earth.”
“I see,” Hun said, but clearly he didn’t. The idea of telling lies in order to achieve a goal seemed to elude him entirely.
Elena continued, undeterred. “That’s where you come in. I need your help coming up with lies the Phants might actually believe. Ones that would make them want to leave in a hurry.”
Hun walked along in silence for awhile. “You do realize you’re asking me to betray my own people, don’t you?”
“Well…not betray, exactly. Convince. Convince them to leave, which is for their own good and ours in the long run, don’t you think? I mean, do we really want to see a replay of the attack on Kapela sixty thousand times over? Because that’s how many domes there are here on Earth, Hun. If we have to take each one by force—well, just imagine the awful loss of life on both sides, and all just to convince the Phants to leave and find another home elsewhere.”
“But…we don’t want to leave Earth,” Hun objected. “This has become our home, too, over the years, and we’ve come to love it. Not its native inhabitants, admittedly, but its abundant water, and its blue skies, and its rich soil. Even its menials have served us well over the years—including yourself, Lim, once upon a time.“
“Those menials you speak of were never yours to take in the first place,” Elena replied. “You took them—you took me—by force, and you forced us to love and obey you through mind control. Don’t you see how wrong that is?”
“We always thought of it as curbing your baser instincts,” Hun replied, seemingly imperturbable. “We couldn’t very well have you killing us in our sleep, could we? Which is what some of you would have done in your natural state.”
“Our natural state,” Elena said through gritted teeth, “is the only state we ever should have been in. You had no right to change us, or adjust us, or fine-tune us to your liking. We don’t like being controlled, can’t you see that? We don’t like being slaves. By now it should be abundantly clear to you that we are sentient beings in our own right who never should have been forced to serve you in the first place. That was always a lie you told yourselves to justify what you wanted to do anyway. We’ve always wanted to live our own lives, free of your interference. Can’t you see that?”
She was yelling by now, she was so angry. Hun had never seen her so worked up.
They walked in silence for an indeterminate amount of time beneath the forest leaves, Elena fuming, Hun inscrutable. Daylight had begun to trickle in through the leaves before they finally spoke again. By then, Elena could see the outlines of a tarred road up ahead.
“I can see you are upset,” said Hun.
“Well, at least you can see that much,” Elena replied coldly.
“And your passionate words do make sense to me, Lim, I want you to know that. Just to be clear, I never supported the forced taking of menials, as you may recall. We spoke of this long ago. I always wished for your people to serve us willingly, but—“
