Ki Book One (27 page)

“
I did as you instructed me not to. I
contacted the High Command, instructing them of our prisoner and
informing them of the death of the Tarkan spy. Approximately 45
minutes later Archer Reed and everyone else in that Guard Station
disappeared.”

Rocking back on his feet, a cold wave of
dread shifted through Jackson
. “They’ll come after you. The Zeneethians won’t rest until
everyone involved in the situation is wiped out. We’re all loose
ends now.”

The Major looked unmoved
. “They already have wiped everyone out. I
ensured I made a colleague contact the High Command. He was found
dead of a heart attack six days ago. The autopsy revealed
previously undetected myocardial disease. Before I left, I ensured
that every document relating to this case was redacted to hide my
identity.”

Jackson was chilled to the bone. The
Major’s casual description of events was horrifying. It seemed he
didn’t care that he’d condemned others
. “Max – I mean Archer Reed – will be able to tell
his people you were involved. They’ll know you aren’t
dead.”

“
On the contrary, I am. I have a body
double. He was also found dead of a heart attack almost six days
ago. Curious, as the man was fit as a fiddle.”

Jackson wanted to shift back, but there was
nothing behind him but that cold brick wall.

He’d always trusted his superior officers.
He’d always followed orders. Though he recognized that war was a
hard, brutal, uncompromising mess, he tried to afford his
commanders with the respect they deserved.

He hated people who equated the military
with monsters. In battles you made hard decisions so others lived,
but that did not mean you automatically lost your humanity.

As Jackson stood there, he realized the
Major showed no concern or compassion. Recounting his story with a
calm and straight face, it obviously did not affect him.

“
All of this goes a ways to confirming your
story,” the Major finally showed a scrap of emotion, but it was
intense anger, and not well-overdue sorrow. “The
Zeneethians....”

“
Listen to me, they’ll try to track us
down. If they think—” Jackson began.

“
They believe we are all dead. As you
advised, I had a section of that gun removed and destroyed. I have
brought the rest of it with us. It is... most interesting,” a deep
passion rang through the Major’s words. His gaze blazed with
interest as a smile curled his moustache.

Now he was showing emotion. It did not
evidence his humanity though; simply his lack thereof. The Major’s
demeanor was one of undisputed dominance and a lust for power.

Jackson did not want to believe what he
was seeing or hearing; though his loyalty had been questioned in
the past several weeks, it was still buried deep in his bones. He’d
always served his country. He’d always known how to protect those
he cared for.

With Ki safely tucked up in the hands of
his military, he should have been thrilled. With the Zeneethians
assuming she was dead, there was no threat she would be kidnapped
again. She was right where Jackson had been trying to get her. In
this facility they could find out her secrets in peace.

So why did his gut feel like it had been
tied to an anchor and pushed into the deepest ocean? As he stood
there and composed himself in the face of the Major’s actions, he
felt nothing but contempt for the man and the whole operation.

“
We will find out her secrets. We will also
find out how that gun works,” the Major gave a crooked smile, “we
have brought it to this facility, and my best scientists are
currently working on it. If you are cleared of your charges, you
will be able to help them.”

Jackson nodded numbly.

“
First, you will need to tell me everything
once again. From the beginning, I want to know exactly what
happened to you. You no longer need to fear that I won’t believe
your story. The events of the past week have proven to me that we
are dealing with an unusual enemy. So tell me
everything.”

Jackson ran a hand down his face
distractedly, his fingers snagging against his nascent
beard
. “Of course,” he
agreed, voice dull.

He was out of the frying pan and into the
fire. While his journey through the mineshafts of Paladin Mountain
had been treacherous, as he talked with the Major he began to
understand that whatever was happening here was worse. Far
worse.

Chapter
Twenty

Ki woke rarely over the next several days.
Wherever she was, they kept her under with drugs, waking her only
when they deemed necessary.

Occasionally she would catch glimpses of
her surroundings. The ground was cold, carved stone, worn down and
scuffed by footfall. The walls were a mix of rock, concrete, and
mottled red brick. Everything looked old and faded, constant sun
exposure and general use having drained it of color and
life.

Whenever her blue curtains were pulled
back, she could see out into the large room around her. Once or
twice she’d caught sight of a squared off, stone window ledge. It
showed a view of some kind of compound, a fleeting glimpse of a
lighthouse beyond, and a thin strip of ocean leading off to the
horizon.

She had no idea where she was. She assumed
it was an island though. She’d overheard the doctors and nurses
talking about something called Avictus. She had no idea whether
that was the name of the island, but it seemed to fit.

She’d given up asking how she’d gotten here.
She’d also stopped demanding they tell her what they were doing to
her. She had never, however, stopped asking to see Jackson.

He had to be here.

If not because reason dictated it, then
because her every hope forced her to believe it had to be so. He
was her only constant now, her only rock. Though they’d never
really gotten along, she would trade this cold building, those
clean blue curtains, and the unsympathetic medical staff for him
any day.

When she was not asleep, she was either
being questioned or poked and prodded with syringes and machines.
The doctors had taken so much of her blood that she had a constant
pounding headache and a numb, tingling sensation in her limbs and
the tip of her nose.

She answered what she could. She told them
about the Zeneethians, about the Scouts, about the weapons she’d
seen. She tried to recount her stay and the experiments that had
been performed on her, but the facts she could remember were scant.
She could describe what had happened, but she couldn’t tell them
why. She’d never understood what the Zeneethian scientists had
wanted her for, let alone what their experiments had been designed
to do.

As the days wound on, she started to
withdraw, accepting her new fate. She was a prisoner of the Ashkan
Military. She would escape only when she died.

Unless there was a
miracle
.

Chapter
Twenty-One

A full week passed before Jackson gained the
Major’s trust enough to be let out of his room. He was not
permitted to walk freely through the facility, but it was a
start.

With every passing hour the Major became
more excited about the Zeneethian gun. Jackson had overheard him
raving about it, lauding it as the weapon that would finally quash
the Tarkans and bring Ashka the victory it had always
deserved.

The mood in the facility was one of subdued
shock. The initial surprise of the particle gun and its incredible
capabilities was wearing off, but people still walked the halls
with pallid, distracted expressions. Even the soldiers were not
immune to it.

They all knew something huge was happening.
Technology centuries beyond their own had all but fallen from the
sky.

Jackson pitied them, but his compassion only
went so far. The Major was not a man who should enjoy the empathy
of others. He did not deserve it.

In the past several days something had
been confirmed for Jackson. A horrible, wounding fact. The people
of this facility, and Major Victor Bradshaw especially, were hell
bent on using this situation for one end: the destruction of Tarka.
It was as if the threat of the Zeneethians was once again a myth.
Every conversation he overheard was about how this would help them
win the next war with ease.

Were they all blind? Were they stupid? Did
they think that the Zeneethians would sit back and let them
manufacture stolen weaponry en masse? Had the Major forgotten Max’s
threats?

Though Jackson riled against it, he still
understood what was happening here. The Zeneethians were an
untested, previously unknown, and unquantified threat. The Tarkans
were not. In the mind of every Ashkan, they were the greatest
monsters to have ever existed. They were the real enemy, because
they were the only enemies his people had ever known.

Presumably the Major believed that once
they annihilated the Tarkans, they could then prepare for whatever
threat Zeneethia would bring. In his mind it was smartest to
complete the easiest task first.

This was all about revenge.

Jackson fought to keep his feelings and
misgivings to himself. As he regained the Major’s trust, he did
nothing to jeopardize his situation. Though he desperately wanted
to see Ki, he did only what he was told until finally one morning
the Major ordered him to help with reverse engineering the
Zeneethian gun.

It felt alien to shrug into a standard white
lab coat and join the other scientists. They were working in a huge
stone hall that had been converted into a lab. It had wide steps
leading down to it from a higher, mezzanine level and a bank of
windows filled one wall. They offered a constant view of the
tossing ocean beyond. Avictus Island, it seemed, was assaulted by
the weather every day. Constant high winds battled the walls around
the compound, and hardly an hour went by without a bank of clouds
racing overhead.

Trying to keep to himself, Jackson set to
work. He was handed a task to image the chamber of the gun, though
he doubted he’d get far. They could copy every single section, down
to the circuits and the screws, but they’d never be able to create
another of those guns. They simply did not have the power
source.

The levitation device. That latticed dust
that made it run. The same substance Ki could use to float.

Without it, any gun they made would be
useless.

He did not share this with any of his
colleagues. He simply bided his time, observing the lab around
him.

Jackson understood he had to make a
decision. An impossibly hard one. Soon he would have to choose
between blind loyalty and informed betrayal. He could either go
along with the Major and his men, or he could do the right
thing.

Leaving the gun and Ki here would only
lead to war, either with the Tarkans or with the Zeneethians as
they came to claim their property. Despite the Major’s best
attempts to hide away on this island, eventually news of what he
was doing here would spread. The second it did, the very moment the
Zeneethians heard that Ki was still alive, they would
descend.

There was only one thing to do. It made
Jackson sick to his stomach to consider it, but the more he tried
to push it away, the more it hounded him.

He had to break her out of here.

It was that or death.

Before his shift in the lab was over, he
received orders to meet the Major. As Jackson walked up the dusty,
worn steps to the mezzanine level, he was sure to glance behind him
one last time. He logged in his memory the exact layout of the
place. The number of guards, the position of the exits, the height
of the windows, and of course the location of the gun.

Then he followed the Major like a good,
loyal soldier should.

Chapter
Twenty-Two

Ki tried to close her eyes against the pain.
It was unbearable. It pulsed and seared through her whole body.

“
Just stop, please, just stop,” she
whimpered.

No one paid the slightest attention to her
pleas.

“
This is incredible,” Doctor Sherk said
again.

She’d began to learn the names of the
various doctors and nurses that attended her. They had never
introduced themselves, but she’d picked them up as they’d chatted
amongst themselves.

Ki even knew some of the soldiers that
guarded her too.

It did not matter though; they never
listened to her.

“
Is the Major on his way?” Sherk yanked
back the blue curtain excitedly, hooking it away, revealing the
rest of the room in full.

“
Yes, sir,” one of the soldiers by the door
snapped a salute.

“
Excellent. He’ll be thrilled that we’ve
finally cracked it.” Sherk stared, wide-eyed at Ki. Though that
wasn’t quite accurate – he looked at her arm.

For the past two days the doctors had
poked and jabbed at the scars the Zeneethians had left. Like
children digging in a sandpit, they’d scoured the flesh with
various devices, taking samples, even hooking her up to
machines.

She’d tried to block them out, just as
she’d once tried to block out the Zeneethians. It was too hard
though. At least the Zeneethians had never tried to hurt her – the
Ashkans didn’t seem to care.

“
Do we have more magnets?” Sherk danced
back on his feet, nervous eyes flicking over the room. He looked
like a host getting ready to entertain an important guest. In a
way, he was. Ki had come to understand how reverent and loyal every
person in this facility was to Major Bradshaw. Or perhaps it was
not him that assured their keen diligence – maybe it was the
prospect of finding out her secrets and using them against her
people. She heard them speaking of how they would use the
Zeneethian gun to finally wipe out every Tarkan. It was no act and
it was no lie; every man and woman on this island wanted to finally
defeat her people, if not kill them outright.