Chapter 32
“The jammer is down.” Caran stretched in his seat. “Full comms have resumed. Only, Opir said they’d give us ten more minutes.”
“Maybe they couldn’t,” Bart said. “They were in Grih headquarters. It was only a matter of time before someone came to check on what was going on.”
“As long as they got away with the jammer, I’m fine with ten minutes less,” Vira said. “We need that jammer for the build.”
“Depending on the wait time off the way station, we should be hearing from them in about an hour,” Caran said. “They’ll load up and follow us.”
Although no one mentioned where they were going, Fee thought it was a good guess that the runner was headed for wherever the Class 5 was being built—duplicate architectural trophy in hand. Looking out of the ship’s front screen, Fee was getting a sinking feeling as to where that might be.
Kyber’s Arm swirled and raged on the planet below.
The perpetual sand storm was bending to the left, looking top heavy and as if it were about to topple over.
The runner passed over it and then began to angle down toward the desert.
Fiona leaned back in her chair. “The old Tecran base? I thought that had been blown up.”
She’d actually been there when it had been destroyed, although practically speaking she had been far enough away to see the pyrotechnics of it, to hear the boom and feel the ground shake beneath her feet, but she’d never gone back to view the devastation.
She had been told it was a crater in the sand.
Obviously not.
“What do you know about the Tecran base?” Vira asked.
Fee studied her. She hadn’t spoken about her time at the base with anyone other than Grih Battle Center, and she realized it was possible these people didn’t know she’d infiltrated the base with Hal, been held prisoner there, and then escaped, a year before.
“Only what I’ve heard from the Grih,” she said. “But I know it was near Kyber’s Arm, and we’ve just gone over the storm and are now coming down to land. It’s a logical conclusion.”
Vira hesitated, then shrugged. “The base was badly damaged, but the two lower levels were salvageable, and the central atrium was the perfect place to build the Class 5.” Vira’s comms unit buzzed at her, and she turned away and spoke softly, giving coordinates and what sounded like a password.
Fee shifted in her chair, trying to get comfortable, and thought about the place Vira called the atrium.
It had been a type of amphitheater two or three floors down inside the base, a place for the troops to watch strange alien creatures fight each other to the death.
She wondered if Vira knew its original purpose.
She had never felt such rage as the day she’d seen what they were doing there, and she had been happy for Eazi to burn it all down.
It looked like it had been better built than they realized.
“I thought the Balcoan government was going to dismantle the base and share any useful information they found with the Grih?” she said.
“That’s what was agreed,” Bart said, and there was a smirk in his voice. “The Balcoan government outsourced it to private contractors.”
“The Grih came in first, worked out the comms center was a smoking ruin, and then left,” Vira said, and she sounded bitter about it. “Once they knew there was no data to be taken, they tossed it back to the Balcoans.”
“At the Balcoans’ insistence,” Fee said. “Or did I get that wrong?”
There was a pause. “No. We did demand that we be the ones to work through what was left,” Vira said at last. “But the Grih only agreed to that because they thought all the useful information had been destroyed.”
“So you complain when they get involved, and then you complain when they don’t get involved.”
Hendric snickered from his place by the console, and Vira shot him a look.
“Landing in five,” Hendric said, losing the smile and turning back to his screen.
Vira murmured into her comm set again, and they set down in a whirl of sand.
From the angle of the sun, it looked like mid-morning, and she’d left Larga Ways at dusk, which meant her day was going to be never-ending.
The runner must have been responsible for the sandstorm, rather than the wind, because after they landed the view cleared and settled, and Fee could see the sienna red of the Balcoan desert stretching out in front of them.
She remembered it all too well. The moisture sucking dry heat, the long, flexible lizards called friens that had a poisonous bite and an attitude problem.
The Tecran. And most frightening of all, the grahudi.
The native predator of Huy, a planet within the Fitalian’s borders, that had scared the living daylights out of her.
She knew everyone thought it was dead, but she hadn’t seen it meet its end, and if something could survive in the harsh conditions of the desert, that thing could.
“Did any of the animals the Tecran were storing in the facility survive?” Fee asked as Hendric shut off the engines.
“None were found. If any did make it out, they’re dead by now,” Vira said.
Let’s hope.
Imogen had told her a chip had been embedded in the grahudi by the Fitali, and it had gone silent after Eazi had blown the Tecran base up. So it was highly likely it really was gone.
No need to borrow trouble, she told herself as she was unclipped from the chair. There was enough here to worry about without a grahudi in the mix.
She had a feeling she’d been brought along as a sort of Class 5 expert, which was strange.
She wondered what had happened to the expert they must have had originally, but she had to admit Vira wasn’t wrong in seeing her that way.
And they had the threat of a Garmman strike on Larga Ways to control her.
But the flip side of that was there was little benefit to them in hurting her. The thought steadied her as she dropped down onto a small landing pad.
The crater Eazi had made when he’d blown up the base was still here, she saw, but it had been reinforced on the sides, creating a perfect space to build a spherical ship.
Bart prodded her forward to a set of stairs that led down into the crater in a series of sharp turns, with a landing at each twist.
As she started down she saw the same type of framework as Paxe’s new ship below, a skeleton of metal covered with Balcoans strapped into harnesses, riveting and welding.
How the hell were they going to launch this into space? she wondered.
“You’re building a Class 5 so you can play in it on the ground?” she asked.
Bart gave a laugh. “No. Why do you think we have the Garmman battleship at the ready? We’ve reached the point where it has to be lifted up. Any more weight and the battleship won’t manage it.”
Fee shaded her eyes and looked over at Kyber’s Arm, then back at the ship. “Okay.”
“I see you think otherwise.” Bart looked back at her, and his expression was slightly supercilious. “Kyber’s Arm is a complication, but it’s moving away at the moment. In two days’ time it’ll be the furthest it ever is from this point. The Garmman say that’s the only safe window.”
“Paxe would be almost done with the outer shell by now if he’d gotten all of this as promised.” They had reached the bottom of the crater, and Fee looked up at the frame, feeling tiny beside it.
“He only got what he did get to stop him from realizing we were never going to give him what he had ordered.” Bart led the way to a door set in the reinforced crater wall and opened it up.
Cool air wafted out, and Fee was happy to step inside. She was already sweating from the short walk from the runner.
She turned to look behind her, but Vira and the other two were nowhere in sight. They had stayed to shut off the runner, but she thought they had started down the stairs after her and Bart.
Bart closed the door, shutting them into a wide corridor that looked like it encircled the whole crater, curving to the right and left.
There was a waiting area, with chairs and a long couch up against the far wall, a water dispenser, and some plants.
Someone had tried to make it look like the foyer of a business.
She wondered who came to visit, and then realized it was probably the managers and owners of the companies supplying the parts for the Class 5. Were they being promised part ownership? Some benefit once the ship was in operation?
The foyer looked neat and sleek, except there were a few cups lying on the ground next to the water dispenser, as if someone had simply dropped them on the floor.
“Can I get some water?” she asked, when Bart didn’t go anywhere.
He nodded, and she walked over to it and waited for him.
“I’ll need you to untie me, or get it for me,” she said after a beat.
He had been on his comms unit, and he lifted his head in surprise and then came over, poured water for her, and lifted the cup to her lips.
She drank the water in gulps until there was nothing left.
“More?” Bart asked.
She nodded, and sipped the second cup more slowly.
“So how does it work?” she asked. “With the companies supplying Paxe? You obviously had to strong arm one of them by blowing up their headquarters, but did the rest just get on board?”
Bart considered her for a beat. “Some were willing, some needed some incentive. Grimwell Materials had a company head that just flat out didn’t like to be told what to do.
We had to make an example of her, and even then, she somehow managed to clear the factory of all the completed parts and send them to the weekly auction.
Pissed Kilmar right off because we had to scramble to buy them up. ”
“And grabbing people off the street and beating them up to interrogate them? Who was behind that?”
Bart frowned. “I don’t know. The Distani head of operations, maybe. He was paranoid and sure every Grih we saw was somehow onto us. I know he took a Grihan military guy prisoner and it burned our Distani operations almost completely because obviously Battle Center has a way to find their people.”