Beyond Armageddon: Book 03 - Parallels (53 page)

           
What have I become?

            Trevor loosened his grip and pulled the barrel away, holding it aloft in the dark corridor and glaring at the weapon as if it were a rattlesnake in his grasp.

            Nina slumped to the floor caressing the red mark on her face.

            "My…my God…" he stumbled."Look…look at who I am. Look at
what
I am."

            He dropped the pistol. It hit the metal-grated floor below with a reverberating
clang.

            He turned to her. She sobbed with her face in her hands. As he spoke, his body shook with fear, fear of himself.

"You took me from my world to save you. That was the truth, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?"

The Major wiped the sleeve of her battle suit across her nose to clean off some of the mess. As she did, she answered in a contrite, soft voice, "Yes."

            "But you didn’t tell me that you were--you
ar
e--invaders here."

            She could not look him in the eye. Instead, she faced the wall and answered, "No. Everyone knew we couldn’t do that."

            "Snowe? The Committee? All of Thebes?"

"Snowe, The Committee, the top Generals, and most of the squad leaders in Third Legion. I told you, Third L had been Snowe's outfit. As things changed, we briefed more people. Just told them to be quiet, mainly."

"You controlled access to me and you never wanted me thinking about supplies and industry or manufacturing or any of this stuff. You didn’t want me to see this place. You didn’t want me to see…" his voice grew louder, "you didn’t want me to see your gateway. Did you think you could hide it forever? Did you?"

She answered only with a sniffle.

He seethed, "You knew I'd find out sooner or later. Did you think I’d just accept it? You thought I’d just…" his voice trailed and he found the answer himself. "Christ, you thought you could make me
like
it here. All the things you
—we—
did. Oh sweet Lord. And I almost…I was becoming…I was becoming
him."

           
No, no, Trevor. You were finding the part of him inside of you. She couldn’t make you into a monster; no one can do that to a man. But she didn’t have to, did she? She just had to find the monster in you. Ask the people of New Winnabow. They know.

            Stone took a long look at the strong Major Forest curled in a ball against the floor wiping tears from her face. Tears he had scared from her. After all, monsters can be scary.

            Trevor turned and marched away.

Cautiously, she raised her eyes and watched him move off in a wobbling gait, glancing down the side passages in search of an escape route. Nina stood and staggered behind him warily, like a storm chaser pursuing an erratic tornado.

She pleaded, "If we can get to Ops we can convince the army to side with you."

Trevor shot her a nasty glance and said, "I don’t care about victory for your people. I'm not an invader. You and everyone else in Thebes are conquerors. Why are you here?"

She answered, "I will tell you everything I know but first, we have to get out of here."

He left the dark passage for a wider, better lit corridor lined with lockers. Nina still followed but fidgeted, anxiously, like a rabbit leaving behind the safety of its hole for a dangerous, wide-open plain.

"You belong here," he told her with a suppressed fury underlying his tone. "This is
your
city, Nina. You built this…this
base
. Stay here. Rot here. Die here. I don’t give a shit."

            He stopped at an intersection to get his bearings. One dark, dirty hallway led down a ramp. A second cleaner, brightly-lit passage went in the other direction. He chose the former. She followed a few steps behind, afraid to get too close.

"Trevor, wait. I…I told you when you first came over I’d help you get home. I promised you. If you’ll let me, I’ll help you."

            Stone stopped, turned, and bound to her. She staggered backwards, stumbled, and actually fell straight on her ass like a child knocked over by a bully.

"You're lying. You would say anything to keep me from leaving."

His hands shook as he spoke. She turned her head and cringed, expecting a blow.

"You showed me how bad I can be. Well I reject it. I reject you! I will not be your tyrant. I fight for
my
people. You are
nothing
to me."

He stormed off two steps but stopped when she said, "We had help."

Nina stood and walked to him, her steps as measured as if she traversed a mine field but lacking any confidence, any sense of control. She had changed from manipulator to beggar.

"We had help bringing you here. We couldn’t have done it ourselves. Snowe had contacts like my Trevor did. I’m not supposed to know, but I think I do."

Trevor turned and looked her in the eyes. He saw defeat there, but a defeated enemy with one last card to play. He quickly understood that this was no longer about keeping him; it was about her personal survival.

"And you’ll tell me," he said. "You’ll tell me everything if I take you with me. Is that it?"

Her lips quivered. "Snowe is going to kill me, too. And without you—" she stopped as embarrassment flooded over her but she was in far too deep to let shame interfere. "I mean, without you, there’s nothing here for me. No one. I have no life in Thebes."

From far away came the sound of soldiers searching the maze of corridors.

"Nothing for you here? Snowe will kill you? I suppose he knows I won’t play along now that I know the truth."

A new thought occurred to Stone. He cocked an eye and said, "Maybe he wanted me back for other reasons, like getting The Committee out of the way. He can make up a story and take over now, can’t he? All without being the bad guy."

            She nodded.

Trevor said, "I’m going, Nina. Goodbye."

            Her voice cracked, "Please don’t leave me behind! I don’t want to be…I don’t want…"

            Trevor leaned in close to her. She averted her eyes.

"Go on."

            Nina admitted, "I don’t want to be alone. Not again. I couldn’t stand that again. I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t leave me alone."

            "You did everything I wanted, even things I didn't know I'd want. Was all that so you wouldn't be alone? Is that what it took for you to keep the other Trevor? I was right from the very beginning; you're nothing like the Nina I knew."

            She leaned against the wall and sighed. A pitiful sight but he cared only out of necessity.

"Can you get us out of here? Get us away from Thebes?"

"Snowe landed his Skipper on the roof. If we can get to it we can get away fast."

When Trevor said nothing she took his silence as acceptance but before she took the lead he warned, "If you deceive me again, if you lie to me, if you try anything I don’t like, I’ll kill you. Do you understand? I don’t care who you look like or what we’ve done. Clear?"

Despite the fact that he was unarmed and she carried two pistols, she believed his threat.

Major
Forest
swallowed hard.

"Okay…um…this way," she led him toward a descending stairwell.

            "Wait. I thought you said we’d head for the roof and take his ship."

            She answered timidly, "If we go down two levels we can cut past the holding chambers and get into one of the cargo tubes. That will take us to an elevator to the roof."

            He did not budge. He did not believe her.

She said, "Listen, back in the old days some of the supplies had to get shipped fast to the front. We had transport tubes from the core to a freight elevator to the landing pads on the roof."

            Trevor said, "Your supplies from another world. From your home world. Right."

            She bit her lip and nodded.

            "Tell me, Nina, why is this city so empty? Where are the reinforcements from home?"

            "We don’t have time for this, Trevor. We have to get going. Snowe isn’t going to let you live now, he’d never trust you and he sure doesn’t trust me. We don’t have time."

            "We’ll make time, soon enough. Okay, go."

Trevor followed the Major down several flights of stairs. They arrived at a wide, lonely corridor. They hid among a pile of crates covered by a tarp as a squad of soldiers marched by.

When clear, he asked, "Did I go from Emperor to wanted man that quick?"

She said, "No, he'll try and keep it quiet. He's probably got a handful of loyal men in here searching for you and everyone else doesn't have a clue. But we don't know which guards are working for him and which aren't, so best to stay out of sight if we can."

One room grabbed his attention, a massive but dormant assembly area. Through an observation window, he spied parts of Skippers—rotor blades, wings—lying about.

            "Too big to come through on their own," he said more to himself than her. "So you send through the parts and assemble the bigger equipment over here."

            "Yes," she admitted.

            He said to her, "I've seen gateways before on my world. The Hivvans had one and that one looked different from the one we destroyed in Binghamton that first year. Yours doesn't look like either of those. Same function, maybe made from different technology?"

            "I guess. Look, we have to keep moving," and she coaxed him forward.

The hall ended at a set of rusting metal doors but passages led off to either side, making a ‘T’ intersection. To the left, a corridor leading to darkness. To the right, a small hall lined with electrical cords and plumbing.

While he waited for her to decide direction, Trevor heard voices from the passage to his right where he saw an archway leading into a lit chamber of some kind. He recognized the tone of the voices: guards issuing orders, no doubt with the added emphasis of a whip.

"Trevor…wait," her voice came in a loud whisper as he drifted toward the sounds. "There’s an access point for the cargo tubes through here. Don’t go that way. Trevor!"

            He paid her no attention as he moved to the archway that, he found, led to a balcony serving as an elevated guard post above a prisoner work area. A soldier stood there, his attention focused on the slaves below.

            Quietly, Trevor dared a step inside for a better look, managing to avoid notice.

            He saw a big room lined with steel girders and metal mesh catwalks that smelled of steam and sweat. Other elevated observation posts remained unmanned, no doubt a symptom of diminished manpower.

            Several conveyor belts flowed into the room dropping bundles into bins. From what he could see from the distance, those bundles included clothing, shoes, personal electronic devices such as shavers and hair dryers as well as other household-type items.

Human workers examined the bundles, discarding some but distributing most to work stations where the items were repaired. At those work stations labored bipedal humanoids with big puffy cheeks, wiry hair, and whiskers of a sort.

Chaktaw slaves.

Still unseen, Trevor returned to the hall and said to Nina, "No deals, no bull shit. You tell me right now, whose Earth is this? The Chaktaw’s?"

            She did not hesitate. "Yes. It’s their Earth. Our mission was to wipe them out."

            Trevor stepped back to the balcony again. The guard there leaned against a post in an effort to remain vertical while he drifted closer to a nap.

            As he glanced over the balcony, he saw a sight he had seen too often on his home world. Sweat shops and industrial slave camps had been critical components of survival for the invading Grand Army of the Hivvan Republic on his Earth. Even the most conservative of guesses pointed to tens of thousands of his people starved or worked to death in such places since the invasion.

            For the first time, Trevor Stone felt pity for a non-human creature.

            He knew the Chaktaw
—the Vikings—
from his Earth, having fought them—no, slaughtered them—at Five Armies. While he did not regret murdering those invaders, he saw them now in a different light. This was their Earth. Their home. Nina and the men of Thebes had no more right to invade and conquer here than the Chaktaw or the Hivvans or the Duass did on his home world.

            "What are you doing you ass?" one of the guards berated a slave. "I said repair this shit, not take it apart. You dumb or something?"

            The Chaktaw to whom the guard spoke actually looked familiar to Trevor, albeit with more bruises and scrapes on his face. It was the Chaktaw prisoner taken from the strip-mall-like outpost they had raided, the prisoner who could speak man's language.

            "You stupid…you still here... you die I think. Fromm come for you."

            WHAM! A back hand from the guard sent the prisoner to the floor.