Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (36 page)

She didn’t know. But she knew it was wrong. Something about it was wrong.

Competing voices spoke louder and louder in the silence of her brain. Her legs trembled restlessly. Her heart beat faster, faster, faster . . .

Until she realized what she needed to do.

Davin, Strange, and Jai hovered over Sierra as she writhed under her restraints, eyes still closed and jaw working as if trying to speak. Strands of damp hair matted to her forehead and snaked down her cheek. Davin used a finger to push them away from her lips.

His heart surged in his chest, fueling his slack body through the exhaustion. His muscles and knuckles ached. His brain labored sluggishly, trying to think of what to do. There was nothing. They kept her hydrated with the IV, but they didn’t have the drugs to pull her out of it. At times, her unconscious stirring seemed as if she might be on the verge of waking up, but she never did. Even when they shook her or shouted her name. Even when Davin held her hand and talked to her when no one else was in the room.

Sometimes her thrashing and squirming petered out to stillness, like final, weak death throes. But she didn’t die either. It was as if she’d been trapped in a twilight zone between life and death.

Davin wondered why he felt such inner turmoil over this, like waves crashing back and forth in his chest. She was just a girl, one of a hundred billion in the galaxy. But she was more than just a girl. She could stop a massive war, save millions of lives from brutal deaths. There was more to it than that, yes. Davin felt it—that shot of panic in his heart when something happened. But he wouldn’t think about it. No point.

Sierra’s legs kicked, and her arms twitched, her head rolling around. The kicking became harder, her knees smacking into the the wall. Jai tightened the strap pinning her down at the thighs. Strange held Sierra’s head so her neck would stay straight. The twitching in her arms turned into steady shakes, like shivering. Her breathing picked up. It grew into gasps, big gulps of air every few seconds.

This was it. The numbness gripped Davin too strong to speak or move. Sierra was about to go. He knew it. Strange’s big, panicked eyes sliced up at Davin as if to ask what to do. Davin wanted to give a command, to calm their nerves, but his own nerves were frozen solid.

Then it stopped. All Sierra’s movement ceased. She visibly relaxed. Her breathing quieted. Her hands floated upward, free from the restraints. Davin watched and waited, staring until his dry eyes forced him to blink.

Then a strong shiver cascaded down Sierra from the back of her neck to her legs. Her eyes burst open. She let out a long, deep breath as if she’d been holding it for ages. Her hands shot down to her restraints. Davin saw the confusion on her face, the panic. She had no idea where she was.

He grabbed her hands and held them tight. “You’re alright! You’re alright!” A measured flow of relief washed through him, like a dam letting only a steady stream through.

Sierra calmed, still breathing heavily. Her wild eyes tamed and turned to Davin. They probed him as if searching the deepest core of his being. It looked as if she had traveled lightyears and lifetimes and swung back like a boomerang to her body.

“Earth,” she sighed through ragged breaths. “We need to go to Earth.”

Carina Arm, on the planet Baha’runa . . .

Morvan descended the steps of the murky, circular, theater-style Strategic Command room. Jarus Vyne, his chief organizer, and Payson Reeger, lead researcher for the Ministry of Arms, stepped inside after him and flanked either side of the main entrance. A handful of analysts and officers stood around workstations at various levels overlooking the impressive holographic display in the center of the room. Two engineers stood under a slowly rotating holo of a troop carrier spacecraft—one of the newer models—pointing at some piece and discussing it. Quiet murmuring scattered through the cavernous, windowless space and blended together.

“Give me the room,” Morvan declared in full voice.

Voices paused, and faces looked up. The engineers, eyes covered by DigiView goggles, turned their heads. It was as if they hadn’t understood their superior.

“I said I need the room,” Morvan repeated. The news about Tanger’s message eliminated his usual preference for tact. “Please vacate and continue your work elsewhere.”

The various staffers and officers in the room swiped their projects onto data tabs, got up, and glided toward the exit. Quiet, inquisitive glances flittered between them, but no one dared vocalize their curiosity. Once the last straggling assistant stepped out, Vyne and Reeger closed the main doors and headed down to join Morvan on the holo deck.

“Tanger contacting us like this . . .” Reeger muttered and shook his head. “Must be pretty damn important.”

“Especially risking a video message,” Vyne replied.

“Let’s find out,” Morvan said, silencing them.

The minister tapped a few buttons, and the hovering display of the spacecraft blinked out. In seconds, a new image replaced it: calm eyes, an officer’s mustache, upraised collar around a sinewy neck, black shoulder straps with silver lining. Tanger’s huge face loomed above them, calm yet urgent.

“Minister.” Tanger’s voice resonated in the mostly empty space, the special ops leader measuring his words carefully. “The vessel we’ve been tracking has changed course. Look at this.”

The holo shifted to a field of stars. Some glowed purple, indicating spacegated systems. A light blue line beginning near the Pelican Nebula zigzagged upward toward Sagittarian space.

“This was their projected gate path as of a few days ago,” Tanger said in a professionally even voice. “But their course has changed.”

Another line, this one bright blue, appeared beside the lighter one, snaking up a different direction.

“It isn’t just a one- or two-gate diversion,” Tanger said. “They’ve gone four nexus gates on this new path. They’ve shifted course.”

Morvan stepped back to take in the full array, struggling to recall the minutiae of Orionite geography. The new direction gave him pause. It looked like . . .

“A few more gates and they’ll be in Confed territory,” Tanger said, finishing Morvan’s thought. “I can’t be certain about their new destination, but if they
were
headed to Earth, they would follow exactly the gate path they’re on now.”

The realization came instantly. Morvan knew what they were doing. Veins bulged in his temple. Teeth ground in his mouth. “
The TransCarina Highway
,” he whispered. Falco’s girl was cleverer than she looked. She knew the one way to fast-track herself back into Carina, the one way to get in without being noticed.

Vyne and Reeger glanced at him but said nothing. Tanger’s face returned in the holo display.

“I will continue to pursue the targeted vessel and inform you of any major developments. If the target
is
headed for Earth . . . Please advise.”

The recorded message blinked out.

Morvan crossed his arms. His mind raced, but he tamed it. No need to panic. Any weakness could be remedied, any move met with a countermove.

“Vyne,” he said in a staccato note. “Get a message to Tanger. If Sierra’s headed to Earth, tell him to apprehend her there.
Alive
. Kill the Orionites. Tell him to contact me the moment both of these are accomplished.” He looked at Reeger. “I need you to find out who else knows Sierra is alive. I trust you know what to do with them.”

Reeger pursed his already thin lips and nodded in sober recognition.

Morvan strode back up the aisle toward the exit, jaw tight. “We need to finish what we started, gentlemen,” he said. “Sierra Falco has evaded us long enough.”

Sagittarius Arm, on the planet Upraad . . .

The two transapien commanders, Maxwell and Rumaya, stood at the edge of the palace landing platform, looking down on the city encrusted against the rocky canyon and the river below. Maxwell’s hands perched on his hips, less for comfort than out of lifelong habit. Old habits died hard, even when he was no longer made of flesh and blood.

Across the chasm, his troops set up the low-altitude aerial defense perimeter, while a few of his engineers walked around the inside of the huge, upside-down-mushroom-shaped firing dishes of the high-altitude laser array. Inspecting. Checking. Double-checking. Testing. Six firing dishes had been planted around the palace and center of Canyon City, where most of Upraad’s sparse population had already gathered.

“Commoners,” the Sagittarians called them. In Carina, they called such people “laborers.” Grimy hands and homemade, handed-down clothing. Crude, greasy guns held on the shoulders of the boys and the elderly by strands of old leather or rope tied to both ends. Able-bodied men and women carried glossy, powerful foreign assault rifles—a terrible mismatch. They set up machine gun posts on ledges and stacked gravel bags against windows inside their burrowed homes. Vain efforts, if they knew the fight that was coming to them. A fight Maxwell had to lead with two hundred of the galaxy’s finest soldiers, plus a few thousand quarry-hardened but untrained fighters, ten thousand other useless weapon carriers, and an incalculable mass of frightened civilians.

Behind the palace, a coarse mountain range sprawled for dozens of kilometers. A land assault would not come from that way. And his Skyshield guns would prevent landers from coming down on top of them, at least as long as they remained functional. That meant the land assault would come from across the canyon, a relatively flat stretch as far as the eye could see.

He looked at Rumaya, now only discernable as a woman by the modest swell at her chest and lack of bulge between her legs. Their sacrifice of flesh had left her a mere silhouette of a woman, and he the silhouette of a man. Otherwise identical. Silver and black distillations of warfare—human weapons. If not for the unit numbers stenciled on the front and back of their heads and each shoulder, as well as the ShadowVision recognition system that identified each transapien in one’s field of view, Maxwell wouldn’t be able to tell one from another. Such was the life of a soldier.

“Do you feel fear?” Maxwell asked Rumaya, out loud so he could hear his own voice. The words sounded strange—robotic. It prompted him to rephrase. “Are you afraid?”

Rumaya studied him with the uniform blue rings in her black eyes. “No,” she said. “Are you?”

Maxwell thought about it, searched himself. “No.” He wasn’t certain he remembered what it felt like to be afraid, but that realization did make him feel . . . something. “What do you feel right now?”

A breeze picked up in the silence, the air warm and dry.

“Nothing,” she replied. “I’m just thinking.” It took some time before it apparently occurred to her to ask: “Are you good, Max?”

“Yes. Of course.” Across the canyon, herds of Upraadis gathered on the far side of the Skyshield carrying mechanical drills and hauling carts of gravel bags. “Go oversee the trench construction.”

Rumaya sent an
affirmative
dispatch through NeuroNet without giving an audible reply, then turned and strode away.

The realization struck soon after she had gone, as if the solitude had granted his humanity permission to re-emerge. He understood now what he felt—that dull, melancholy sensation.

Regret
.

He had felt it since the final surgery, he realized. A distant wistfulness. The transformation had changed him, as he knew it would, but in ways he had not anticipated. He missed things that never mattered to him when he was flesh and blood. The touch of someone else’s skin against his. Someone’s eyes—
real
eyes—looking at him. Especially a woman’s. The flavors of food. The indescribable joy of chewing, of laughing from the gut, of scratching an itch, even the sting of tears in his eyes, that biological stopcock for releasing emotion.

These were dangerous thoughts. A virus in his brain. But they could not destroy anything not already bound for destruction. Maxwell stood on the planet where he would most likely die. He could let his mental discipline slack a bit. A man, even a soldier, should be allowed to think a few dismal thoughts before his end.

Maxwell
, Andrews dispatched through NeuroNet.
Abelard wants to discuss troop placements. Should I bring him to you?

Maxwell turned and saw Andrews staring at him from across the platform, by the palace entrance. Between them, two small spaceplanes sat on the tarmac, side by side, wings folded upward, all gray with no markings. Several of his troops still hung from the back of the fuselage, rolling stencil panes over the vertical stabilizers. They had not finished, but the symbol was recognizable.

No,
Maxwell replied through NeuroNet.
Take him to the throne room. I will meet him there.

Affirmative
. Andrews turned and went back into the palace.

Maxwell watched his troops carefully apply the specially designed paint roller to both spaceplanes, both sides of the vertical stabilizers. They hung in harnesses from straps hooked in to the top of the fuselage, using their bodies to shield their work from onlookers. With everyone in sight of the platform busy with their own preparations, it seemed unlikely anyone would notice until his troops had finished the stencil. And by then, it would not matter.

A different kind of regret pushed its way into Maxwell’s head. He never assumed he would die on a planet like this, fighting alongside foreigners against an enemy toward which he held no hostility, under these circumstances, with this singular goal in mind.

Was this the right way to die? Would this do all for Carina that Sorensen had said it would?

It did not matter. Not anymore. Here he stood. Here he would fight. Here he would likely perish. All that mattered was his mission, and he would see it through. Whatever happened, Maxwell hoped his fellow Carinians—the ones who cared enough about the intricacies of history to read about him—would be inspired by his service. His sacrifice.