Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (44 page)

The offworlders went on through an archway with “Level 6: Spaceport Platform” engraved around the top, but Rumaya paused outside it. Her blue eyes blazed at the Upraadis as they halted in front of her. She gave off a strange aura, even though her features looked the same as they always did. She surveyed them with an inhuman sort of pity. Almost apologetic.

“Your people were never meant to be free,” she said. “I see that now.”

A hard, growling, floor-shaking explosion hit somewhere above them. Through the archway, across a long transition chamber lined with body-length lockers and behind a glass airlock, falling stones cracked against the landing pad. An offworld soldier ran to escape them but was crushed under a boulder. A dozen other transapien soldiers stumbled, struggling to keep guns up and firing. Only one of their spaceplanes remained to protect. The other must’ve left already.

An offworlder rushed back to the archway and looked at Rumaya. “We need to go.”

Rumaya extended her dense, metallic hand and clasped Abelard’s knobby shoulder. “I’m sorry we couldn’t do more.”

She turned and hurried after the male offworlder. Their team waited in the airlock at the end of the chamber.

Abelard’s chest slumped. Insides went hollow. Heart quieted. Mind froze. Thoughts shut off. All fading into numb paralysis. Hope vanished faster than he thought possible—as fast as it took the offworlders to flee.

The interior airlock doors sealed behind Rumaya and her compatriot. The outer doors slid open. The offworlders rushed out and around the rocks, blasting mini-rockets up at the sky as they moved. A ladder lowered from the body of their spaceplane. They filed in one after the other.

Seraphina projected a map of the palace and its surrounds onto the ground. She studied it, jaw fixed, eyes wild and desperate, breaths quick and indignant. Whatever her idea, it was no use. Swan had swept away the Upraadis’ entire presence on the surface. Broken and scattered the ranks across the embankment. Obliterated the Upraadi sharpshooters at the peak of the palace mount. A handful of offworlder autodrones still buzzed around Swan’s fighter jets across the canyon, but they wouldn’t hold out long. Whitesuits closed in on the palace from all sides. In some tunnels, Upraadi fighters were in full retreat, running for their lives as whitesuits picked off the stragglers. So many brothers and sisters had already fallen—thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Abelard felt their loss like a drill bit to the sternum. More fell every second.

Seraphina pointed a slender finger at the center of the palace. “If we concentrate our fighters here, we can funnel them.”

Abelard shook his head. “Seraphina—”

“They’ll have to come at us from the main corridor,” Seraphina went on. “They’ll have no cover. They’ll have to—”

“Seraphina!”

She paused and met his defeated eyes.

“Rumaya was right,” Abelard said. “We’re finished. We lost. Swan’s hands are around our necks. They’ll strangle us if we don’t escape.”

The fire drained from Seraphina’s face, the redness from her cheeks. The map disappeared from her cuff. She stepped backward, as if recoiling from a blow.

Abelard raised his own cuff. “Gable . . . Gable, can you hear me?”

A moment later, the reply came, jumbled by the heavy patter of gunfire. “I can hear you, Abelard! Where are the offworlders? We need backup!”

Abelard hesitated. “There won’ be any backup. The offworlders have fled.”

“What?”

“Where are you?” Abelard asked.

“North wing of the palace.”

“Retreat,” Abelard commanded. “Tell everyone to retreat. Go down to the nether levels. Escape through the mineshafts. We’ll meet at the southeastern quarry.”

“What are you saying?” Gable asked incredulously. “Let them win?”

“They’ve already won. Any more lives we lose will be wasted.” Abelard waited for a reply but got only silence. “Gable, did you get that? Confirm that you heard me.”

“I heard you,” he snapped. “We’ll fall back to the quarry.”

“Good.” Abelard let his wrist fall to his side. His shoulders slouched. He stared off at the landing platform behind the walls of glass, now barren of planes and soldiers.

A teeth-grinding rage swelled within him—rage over all that had already been wasted, all that he’d already sacrificed. All of it to become like Radovan. Or maybe to avenge his lot in life. Abelard wasn’t sure anymore. All he knew was that it had all been lost. Burnt up in a moment like paper.

Seraphina took his arm and pulled him toward the stairs. “Let’s go.”

Searing pain shot through Guarin’s sides with every breath. A few ribs were broken, at least one on each side. Their jagged points stabbed into his lungs when he inhaled. It made the duller pain of bruises and cuts and aching bones seem bearable.

Except the throbbing in his knee. That hurt like hell—mini-explosions going off around the kneecap multiple times a second. The elbow he’d used to smack the metal man’s face stung, too. Blood ran down the his arm from it. And then there was his swollen pinky finger, which hung at a weird angle and refused to move. Also broken.

He almost wished the fall would’ve just killed him. But then he wouldn’t have had the pleasure of seeing Swan conquer this pathetic planet, or the pure joy of hunting down and butchering the bitch who killed Guerlain. He only hoped no one had beaten him to it.

The roar of engines swooped over the cliff far above, angling down into the river valley. One of those foreign spaceplanes, followed by three Swan shuttles, raining rounds after it, hitting it only sparsely. The nimble, foreign plane barrel rolled and tilted left and right to avoid the rain of fire—successfully, for the most part. The plane took a sudden dip and hurtled past Guarin, meters above the river, whipping a spray of water against the embankment. Rounds peppered the river in its wake, and the white shuttles roared by in pursuit.

Lukewarm river water mixed with Guarin’s sweat on his forehead. He wiped his brow with his good hand and shook it off.

A short, limping walk ahead, Guarin heard a subtler sound. It came from behind a boulder on the level path snaking alongside the river. He quieted his steps. The sound became clearer—faint, muffled sobs.

Guarin edged around the boulder to find a gruesome scene. Ten or more bloodied bodies, lying in awkward positions, carpeted the area. Some of them had been ripped apart so completely that only a hand or foot was recognizable. In the center of the macabre display, a scrawny, bearded man of perhaps fifty knelt over a woman’s corpse, rocking back and forth. Stifled, scared sobs escaped him as he mumbled a name Guarin couldn’t make out. Over and over again he mumbled the name, inaudible from behind his breather mask. The ravaged woman, Guarin supposed. His lifemate. The woman who birthed his children, perhaps.

Past them, a dirt path led up a slope to a stone doorway—an entrance to the city. Suddenly, the poor sod’s plight seemed only an annoyance.

A black combat rifle leaned against the boulder a few meters away. Guarin placed a stabilizing hand against the rock and limped toward it. The old commoner heard the shuffling of feet, wiped his eyes, and gasped as he saw Guarin. He reached across his woman’s corpse for a gun, but Guarin moved faster. As the old man hefted the gun, Guarin aimed his own across the back of his off hand and fired a burst. It plowed through the man’s scraggy chest, splattering crimson against rocks and corpses behind him. He flopped across his lifemate’s body. The two became one in death.

Guarin lowered his weapon, feeling satisfied. He’d done the fellow a favor, really. He’d put a wounded animal out of its misery.

He continued onward, maneuvering around bodies toward the sloping path. He had more work to do. More killing.

Kastor woke to the sound of rhythmic, confined breathing. Wheezing inhale, strained exhale. In and out, in and out, again and again. Eventually, he realized it was himself. He was breathing. Still inside his suit, then. And still alive. Good.

A thick haze slowed his thoughts, numbed his senses. Weakness and exhaustion held him in stasis.

In the silence, a diaphanous voice trickled into his mind from impossibly far away. A delicate voice. Skittish. If he concentrated on it, the words went away, so he relaxed his mind and sank into it like listening to a heartbeat against someone’s chest.

You don’t ever worry, do you? You should. Perhaps the queen will send me to a faraway planet. Perhaps I’ll die in the line of service.

Her words echoed cruel and sweet in his head, teasing more profoundly now than they did then. A forlorn reminiscence of a bygone life.
Alright, I’ll say it first . . . I missed you.
Like chimes tinkling in the breeze from a distance.
Careful, cradlemate. Don’t let the castle life make you too magnanimous . . . You’d need a lord’s title for an epithet . . . The one
we
were born for . . . If you’ve made your choice, then get on with it . . . Take what is yours . . .

The woman’s voice seemed to speak over itself, coming to a crescendo in Kastor’s mind.

Take it!

Pollaena. Yes. It took him too long to realize that. Mind so sluggish.

And like that, her voice disappeared into the ether, as if just thinking Pollaena’s name banished her from his presence. A newfound quiet engulfed him, a silence so searching and so complete that it crushed him under its weight. Kastor wanted to weep. His heart throbbed in the same inescapable pain he felt the moment his blade pierced Pollaena’s chest.

Then an alarm beeped in his ears and red lights flashed on his visor, making him flinch. His arms moved, floating lightly through darkness, but his legs wouldn’t budge. Memories flooded back into his brain: grabbing the husk door, burning through the atmosphere, falling toward the canyon, crashing into the river. He flicked on his helmet lights. Dark stalks of mossy seaweed drifted up diagonally from the bumpy riverbed, all tilting the same way like grass driven by the wind. Brown creatures with beady eyes and rippling flaps on their sides swam away from the newfound light—probably more than they ever saw down here.

Kastor craned his head to look up at the distorted film of the surface thirty or forty meters above. Then down at the dusty crater he’d made when he plowed into the sediment. He was buried up to his belly in pebbles and mud.

Kastor let out an impulsive laugh. He’d survived a fall from orbit. That seemed to merit a little levity.

Then, with the specter of Pollaena still lingering in the vault of his mind, watching over his shoulder, he started digging.

Abelard felt the vibrations of Swan boots crawling around his tunnels. They closed in on the surviving Upraadis like a coiling python, squeezing tighter and tigher.

Seraphina took his hand as the flow of fighters turned out of the stairwell shaft and into a sloping corridor. His thigh burned, and his good leg ached from compensating, but he kept on without a word. None of his brethren spoke. The tacit knowledge of their defeat was enough to sap everyone of speech. A stench wafted behind the retreating lot, a mixture of sweat and death.

At the far end of the corridor, whitesuits ran into view, as startled by the Upraadis as the Upraadis were by them. Gunfire erupted. Fire streaked up and down. Lights blew out. The foremost Upraadi fighters fell in a wave, bodies chopped into bloody sacks. The whitesuits took more hits before going down.

Seraphina pulled Abelard along as they retreated, everyone backtracking to the stairwell. A thousand feet stamped the ground as men shouted and guns blared through the tunnels. Bodies pushed and elbowed against each other as the Upraadis fled down another level. The shaft only went down to the lowest level of the palace, where there was no escape to the nether region. They had to find a way out before that.

“Here,” Seraphina said, stopping by a service door marked with a label only the palace servants understood. She tapped at keys on the touchscreen. The first code failed, so she rubbed her forehead and thought of another one to try. “I used to go in here to hide from my nanny as a girl.” When she typed in the second code, something inside the door clunked. She opened it to reveal a long, dim, tube-lined passageway.

“Where does it lead?” Abelard asked.

“Away from here,” Seraphina said. She looked at the crowd rushing by. “This way! Brothers and sisters, follow me!”

Some eyed her as they passed, but none stopped. None stepped out of the flow of bodies.

“Friends, this way leads to safety!” Seraphina shouted. “Follow me!”

A bulky, shirtless man slowed his pace and snarled at them. “We tried following you two. Look where it got us.” He spat at Seraphina’s feet and kept on.

Abelard touched her forearm. “It’s fine. Let’s just go.”

But before they moved, Gable barreled down the stone hallway and stopped when he saw them. Five of his men stopped with him. The rest went on. He nodded at Abelard, not happy but not ready to abandon loyalties either. “Lead the way.”

Seraphina guided their small contingent through the cool, dank air of the service passage. She paused at each split in the tunnels, recalling which way led where.

“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Abelard asked, quiet enough to prevent Gable and the others from hearing.

“Anywhere’s better than out there, right?”

“That isn’t reassuring,” Abelard said.

They passed into a long stretch without any light, only the pale reflection from behind and a glow from far ahead. Abelard’s feet splashed in cold puddles formed from leaky pipes. When they finally emerged into light again, he spotted a door down the corridor.

“See, Abby?” Seraphina said. “You had nothing to worry about.”

“I always worry about you, sister,” Abelard muttered.

“You shouldn’t.”

“As if there was some switch I could turn off.” Abelard glanced over his shoulder to see if others heard. Seemed they hadn’t.

“Don’t get sentimental,” Seraphina said. “It’s not the time.”