Shadow Heart (13 page)

“I’ve seen it already, Doctor, and I’ve seen worse before.”

He peeled away the top strip and exposed the lacerated flesh underneath, and Davian winced. Had she been awake, she would have been in extraordinary pain. He had seen worse, it was true—but not much worse, not in the living. The doctor removed the rest of the bandages until her entire back was visible. Four long claw marks, bright red and bleeding, ran the entire length from her right hip to her left shoulder. The discarded bandages were soaked in blood.

“You say she’s out of the woods?”

“Believe it or not, the bleeding is a good sign,” the doctor said as he got to work sewing up the wounds. “It means her body hasn’t cut off blood flow to these wounds…no frostbite. When you first brought her in I was worried she would need serious restorative surgery. But I’ll be able to sew her up just fine. She’s lucky. That cougar’s claws could have sheared right through her spine.”

Davian nodded. He’d had his fair share of encounters with cougars in the Wilderness. No sane man loved the thought of death…but there was something about being eaten in the process that made it a bit more terrifying. Unfortunately, that was often a reality of life in the Wilderness. Most learned to stay out of the animals’ domain unless they were in large numbers. But this woman, evidently, hadn’t known.

“What of the hypothermia?”

“Intravenous fluids stabilized her at an internal temperature of 98 degrees. She was at about 93 when you brought her in. Between that and the blood loss, it will be best to let her sleep for a couple of days so that her body can recharge. I don’t want to get your hopes up, as anything can go wrong quickly out here, but I think she will make a full recovery.”

Davian breathed a long sigh of relief. When he had found her, shivering in the shadow of that old building like a terrified animal, he knew her chances of survival were not good. But he couldn’t leave her there to die alone. She could have gotten lost, her group could have been attacked or killed, maybe she even ran away. It was common in the Wilderness. Plus, he had felt drawn to her. At first he rationalized it as an attraction to a beautiful woman in distress; what man wouldn’t want the pleasure of saving her? But now…

He knelt on the floor beside her and pushed a long blonde curl out of her face. His skin brushed against hers, still cold but nothing like the icy chill he had felt while trying to keep her alive out there.

The doctor continued his work, but the concern in his voice made his disapproval plain, “I trust your interest in this woman is wholly professional, Lieutenant Commander. A military advantage?”

“Right now, I care only that she survives.”

“Understood, sir. But the commander must be told—”

“She will be. I’ll see to it.”

He rescued a helpless woman from the Wilderness, but upon his return learned that she wasn’t a damsel at all. The doctor, a recent defector from the Empire, had recognized her immediately. Luckily Davian had managed to keep the truth contained, but that wouldn’t last long.

The woman he had brought right into the middle of the Silent Thunder camp was in fact Elizabeth Aurora, Chief of Command of the Imperial Guard. Worse, he was still drawn to her, and his interest was
not
wholly professional.

Davian stood and backed away from Liz’s bedside. “Watch her. I want to know the second she wakes.”

“W
HAT IS IT?
”

“It's a single tooth from an old SD card—as in very old, obsolete even by the fall of the Old World.”

Grace sat with Crenshaw at a small table in the communications tent, her fractured leg elevated on a chair and her crutches within a hand’s reach. Crenshaw leaned over the table, fingers entwined and knuckles white, eyes glued to the canvas screen with the intensity of a master scientist. Perhaps he saw something there, but if so it was lost on her. It was just an endless stream of numbers.

She wished Davian had been there to counter Crenshaw’s secretive manner, but he had been conspicuously absent when they arrived. She hoped he wasn’t avoiding her.

“Why would someone go to the trouble of using an antiquated data card?”

“So that they
could
split it,” Crenshaw answered. “As a precaution.”

The communications officer frowned and shook his head in disbelief, “The card would have to contain very sensitive, very valuable information to go to all that trouble.”

“Valuable, yes,” Crenshaw said. “And dangerous. They didn’t want this information falling into the wrong hands. Perhaps not
any
hands.”

“How many of these are there?” Grace asked.

“If I’m right about the SD card…could be as many as eight.”

“
Eight
?” Grace forgot for a moment that she was injured and tried to rise. Pain shot up through her leg and forced her back down into the chair, where she settled grudgingly. She hated feeling like an invalid. “It took us a year just to find this one. We don’t have eight years. The world will lay in ashes from the System's civil war in two, maybe less. You heard what happened in Rio. A hundred thousand wiped out in a single stroke, and that was Sullivan’s army. When Napoleon Alexander strikes back, it will be worse.
Much
worse.”

“Even eight years seems optimistic,” the officer said. “Without even a location, there’s nothing—”

“I already have five of them,” Crenshaw interrupted. “This makes six, and if Commander Aiken’s voyage north is successful we’ll have seven. That leaves only one left to find, and I believe I know where it is.”

Grace hid her astonishment well; it had become common practice with Crenshaw. She kept her voice even and her tone calm, “Gentlemen, please give the general and I the tent.”

The officer nodded, “You heard the commander, men! Clear the tent!”

They shuffled out quickly, no doubt keenly aware of the tension that had suddenly fallen around them. The only one who seemed oblivious was Crenshaw himself, who continued to stare at the numbers on the screen as though willing answers to appear. Even when they were alone, he didn’t appear to notice.

“Care to explain yourself, Crenshaw?” she said into the awkward silence.

“Perhaps if you told me what you’d like to hear.”

Her frustration rose, but she did her best not to let it show, “You sent Aiken north?”

“I asked him to go, and he agreed. Aiken leads the remnant of the 1
st
Battalion and is not under your command, so I wouldn’t see it as subversion of your authority.”

“I don’t. I see it as manipulation. You’ve led the 2
nd
Battalion around by the nose for the last year looking for this thing, with nothing but the promise that it could change the balance of the war. Now I hear that you’ve been doing the same to the 1
st
without my knowledge? What am I supposed to think?”

“That any good tactician knows not to bet the entire war on a single battle…not until he is sure he can win.”

“Does Aiken know what you sent him after? Do
you
even know?”

“I told Aiken what I told you,” Crenshaw’s lips were thin, his brow furrowed with concern. “But I had expected him back weeks ago. So far as I know, there has been no word.”

“And the Spectorium stands between him and us.”

Crenshaw nodded, “And yes, I know what this is…or at least, I know enough.”

“I would like the truth, Crenshaw. The
entire
truth, for once.”

“You might regret that in a few moments.”

“Between that and the fear that your secrets will destroy us, I’ll take the truth.”

Crenshaw finally tore his gaze from the screen and surveyed her with cool, calculating eyes—eyes that reminded her so much of Eli that it nearly quelled her anger…nearly.

“I kept the fragments secret for a reason. Truthfully, I wasn’t certain we would make it this far, and there was no point having this conversation otherwise.”

“You weren’t sure?” Grace demanded. “Then what have we been doing all this time?”

“Surviving,” he replied. “We abandoned Alexandria in defeat, Grace. You and I failed with Eli, and Silent Thunder failed to make much more than a dent in the World System. I knew only a miracle would hold us together—even the 2
nd
was in danger of fragmenting with your father gone. We needed something to
do
, something to strive for. So I…picked this.”

“A worthless string of code,” Grace said. “Crenshaw, Traughber and all those men I took with me
died
for this!”

“I know,” he said. “So I can’t let you go on in the dark. Nor can I let you believe it is just a string of code. It’s not.” He rose and stepped over to the control panel, where he punched in several commands. “It’s a map.”

The screen changed, and the numbers were replaced by a series of lines. Grace squinted, trying to make sense of it.

“The identical number strings refer to roads,” Crenshaw explained, and it finally clicked. Most of the lines were laid out in a grid-like pattern, which could have referred to nearly any city in the world. But it was the larger roads, the old highways, that often made a city immediately distinct. One of the roads was enormous—so large that she had to question the scale of the map. There were three other larger roads, one of which crossed the behemoth. Once it reached the other side—west, by her reckoning—the other two roads spread out from it to form a curved trident.

“Does it say where this is?”

“No, and that’s why it took so long to find this fragment. I didn’t recognize the layout of the city, and without satellite imaging had to locate it myself. But luckily we won’t have that problem this time. I know this city.”

“From that giant road?”

“That’s not a road,” Crenshaw said, suddenly grim. “It’s a river.”

Grace’s eyes widened, and a pit of dread opened in her stomach, “I hope you don’t mean
that
river.”

“Unfortunately I do. This is St. Louis, the city now known as Corridor Prime.”

Grace fought the urge to stand up and pace as anxiety-fueled adrenaline coursed through her veins. Prime was the most powerful outpost along the Corridor, a network of urban domains constructed to inhibit passage across the Mississippi River. A Solithium-powered fence similar to the one that isolated Domination Crisis Eleven from the world had been built on the river’s banks, and while the Corridor was not as densely populated as the other urban juggernauts that made up the World System, that was only because it stretched from Corridor North on Lake Superior down through Corridor Prime and all the way to Corridor South in the Gulf. The Corridor served as a massive line of defense against land invasion for Alexandria—smart, considering that would be the route the Imperial Conglomerate’s main force would have to take.

But Silent Thunder was no match for it, and Prime lay on the other side of the Solithium fence.

“What are our other options?”

“We can wait for Aiken to return, though his fragment—assuming he has it—will only lead to one that has already been found. Corridor Prime is the last.”

“I’d sooner break back into Alexandria than cross that river,” Grace said. “So this is it then. What you were really doing all those years.”

“Yes,” Crenshaw replied. “Jonathan left two in my possession. It took me eight years to find the other three, and then the Right Hand…McCall…found me. He warned me that if I didn’t stop searching, I might create something worse than the World System. He offered me a place in the Resistance, and I took it. But still, I wondered.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“Some technologies change the world for the better, Grace. Others should have been buried as soon as they were made.”

Fear passed swiftly over the general’s face—only for a moment, but the depth of it was enough to terrify her. “What are we talking about here? A weapon? A disease?”

For a while Crenshaw remained silent, as he had several times when sidestepping her questions. But not this time. She wouldn’t allow it, not if he was asking her to lead Silent Thunder into Corridor Prime. She opened her mouth to demand answers, but stopped when his voice cut through the silence instead.

“Did your father ever tell you
why
Silent Thunder was formed?”

“Of course. To neutralize nuclear power in Persian-controlled territory.”

“That was our objective, but there were plenty of Special Forces already in existence that they could have assigned that mission.”

“None of them specialized in the Spectral Gladius.”

Crenshaw nodded, “But it wasn’t because of the superiority of the Gladius in battle, which we were just beginning to understand. It was the effect of the Solithium discharge from the weapon’s secondary form. Even an indirect hit renders affected matter inert: life, electrical systems…plutonium. We could neutralize a silo quickly because we didn’t need to bother with disarming each bomb. All we had to do was shoot them.”

“Everyone knows the story, Crenshaw. Silent Thunder saved the West from nuclear annihilation. But I don’t see what that has to do with this.”

“No one ever thought the countries of the Middle East would unite into one nation. But when Solithium made oil as worthless as the sand in their deserts, they did. No one ever thought that a group of culturally backward and economically declining states could mount an effective stand against the industrial powers of the world. But they did.