EIGHTEEN
When the radio popped, X had dozed off. He nearly fell out of his chair reaching for the comms equipment.
A weak voice vied with the static crackling that filled the capitol tower’s command center. Miles looked up from the deck, then quickly lost interest. Resting his head between his forepaws, he closed his eyes and let out a sigh.
“No, no, no,” X muttered. He hadn’t heard from Les or anyone else on the airship for almost two days and was starting to worry that something had happened.
Of course something happened.
“Captain Mitchells, do you copy? This is Xavier.”
X waited for a response, lowering his head as if in prayer, but that just made him feel more tired. He glanced at the wall-mounted clock. It was well past midnight.
He rubbed his eyes and slapped his cheeks. For the past two days, he had slept only a couple of hours at a time, just as he had during those years back in the wastes. But instead of fighting for survival, he was fighting a more internal battle.
Mallory had hit a nerve the night of the funeral for her husband and son. Her assessment of his leadership had him wondering about his ability to protect his people. He certainly hadn’t saved Rhett or DJ.
Since then, he was second-guessing all his decisions, from letting the Cazadores keep their army and navy to sending his people and the only airship back into the killing wastes. Hell, he was even starting to wonder whether decommissioning the Hive had been the right call. What if someday they needed to escape this place?
He tried the radio again. “Captain Mitchells, this is X, do you copy? Over.”
More static filled the room.
X stood up, stretching his tired muscles. What he needed was a long swim.
No, you need sleep.
Candlelight flickered over the command center, just two floors below the Sky Arena. It wasn’t a big space—just a few tables, two desks and chairs, and the bank of radio equipment—but it served as his war room.
A flat-screen computer sat on one of the tables, and rolled-up maps covered the other. Stacked on a desk were several books that Imulah had found documenting Cazador missions. X picked up the record of General Santiago’s mission to find the skinwalkers—the mission that had turned up Gael. He thumbed to the page with the sketches: a beach, an old lighthouse, and what looked like an ancient fortress—nothing he hadn’t seen before in the wastes.
But the bizarre scarecrow-like human remains that Horn and his crew had assembled were unlike anything X had encountered during his decade in hell. The barbaric nature of the kills was beyond even what Sirens did. Sirens killed without regard for their victims’ suffering. But skinwalkers went out of their way to prolong and intensify the suffering.
And it was eerily similar to the defectors’ ghoulish handiwork. Why?
It didn’t matter, really. All that mattered was being ready to stop them if prisoner Gael was right.
The radio crackled again. “This is Captain Mitchells. Does anyone copy?”
“Giraffe!” X shouted. “This is X! What’s your status?”
“Sir, we’ve got a major problem out here.”
“What happened now?”
“Whales happened, sir. A group of them attacked Star Grazer…” Les paused long enough for X to deduce that the ship was now at the bottom of the sea.
“She’s gone,” Les confirmed.
X stared at the handset. Two Cazador warships gone in the same week.
“Survivors?” X asked after the pause.
“We rescued about a third of the Cazador crew and the Sea Wolf, but the vehicles and all the fuel are gone, sir.”
“How about our people?” X asked.
“All present and accounted for.”
“Good, and General Santiago?”
“Alive,” Les said. “We’ve been trying to get ahold of you for days now. Should we come home, or proceed? Now that we’re no longer caravanning with a slow-moving warship, if we continue at max speed, we can reach the target in only a few hours.”
Just a few hours. His team was tantalizingly close to the target, to finding out whether there were indeed survivors out there. Or defectors…
“Sir, the skinwalkers—they could be sailing Raven’s Claw to the islands,” Les said. “Don’t underestimate them, sir. What we saw was pretty horrific.”
“I know, and I won’t,” X replied. “I’ve got our defenses squared away, I think.”
“I can turn us around and be back in a day, sir.”
An airship would certainly help mitigate the emerging skinwalker threat to the Vanguard Islands, especially now that they had lost Star Grazer. But Discovery was practically within pissing distance of its objective. X didn’t want to scrub the entire mission without first doing some aerial scans to see what they were dealing with. And, of course, the defectors could be there, hunting down the survivors.
He couldn’t abandon them now.
Static crackled from the speakers.
“Check out the signal,” X said. “Find those survivors, and if defectors are there, destroy them. Then get your asses back here.”
“Yes sir,” Les said. “And, Xavier?”
“Yeah?”
“Look after my family. They’re all I have left.”
“I’ll make sure nothing happens to them,” X promised. “You have my word, Captain.”
The door opened just as the line severed, and X got up to greet Lieutenant Sloan.
“Was that Discovery?” she asked.
X gave her the gist of the call.
“Damn,” Sloan said.
X was sick of questioning his decisions, and he was even sicker of doing nothing. He scooped a handheld radio off a charger and handed it to Sloan.
“Deploy a team of soldiers to the Hive,” he said. “I want two machine-gun emplacements on the roof, and one of our turret-mounted thirty-millimeter cannons.”
“Protecting it from what kind of attack, sir?”
“From Raven’s Claw,” X said. “I want this by sunset.” He looked at the clock. “You’ve got eighteen hours, Lieutenant. Can you make that work?”
“I’m not the one that’s always late,” she said, cracking a rare smile.
“Yeah, yeah,” X said.
Miles got up and followed him out of the command center. He went left down the hall. Around the next corner a militia guard stood outside a door.
X went inside the former brig that his people had retrofitted into an armory. Their weapons were neatly stacked on shelves on the other side of the barred barrier splitting the quarters in half.
Behind the bars, a man named Dusty sat at a desk. He stood, shook his long gray hair back, and gave X a mostly black smile.
“You must be here for your new gun,” he said.
Dusty walked back into the armory, past a shelf of militia armor and helmets. Stopping at the rifles, he bent down and picked up a modified AK-47-shotgun combo.
“Just sign here, sir,” Dusty said, handing a clipboard through the window.
They had implemented the same rules governing weapons as on the airships: every firearm accounted for at the end of each day.
Dusty grinned as he walked over to the barred door. Unlocking it he proudly handed X the gun.
“Would love to see how it fires in person.”
X took the rifle. It was lighter than he had expected. He raised it toward the ceiling, looking through the scope. Then he lowered it and put the strap over his shoulder.
“And the ammo?” X said.
Dusty threw his arms up. “Well, shit, can’t forget that.”
He returned a moment later with a bag of 7.62 mm magazines and double-aught shotgun shells. Miles sniffed the bag, then sat back on his haunches when he realized there was no food.