39The stun field Zane discovered is just the beginning. In the days that follow, the enemy continues to ramp up their efforts against us, laying any number of mines and traps and even setting up ambushes. We use the SDs to navigate around them, penetrating the enviro-shield in obscure places, entering facilities in nonstandard ways, and simply avoiding targets that are too heavily booby-trapped to penetrate. If they sabotage doors, we go in through windows. If they set an ambush at the front of a facility, we go in through the back. If they lay a trap at the water plant, we hit a supply depot instead. For a time, our strategy works. Their personnel is limited, and their resources even more so. No matter how much they prepare, they can’t be everywhere at once. Apparently, they realize it too, for not long after they remove our access to the enviro-shield once again, this time for good.
Mercury is stumped. Though they’ve locked us out more than once, we’ve always found a way back in—adding new access codes, re-enabling old ones, or hijacking active ones. Not this time. No matter what methods he tries, nothing works. With our codes disabled, we’re forced to go to plan B: access the settlements through natural gaps in the shield. Using the SDs, we suss out all the gaps big enough to allow access. Unfortunately, there are limited gaps, and the enemy seems to know every one of them.
Mines, military drones, and even squatters await us at every entry point we try. The first couple of times, we manage to abort, breaking off our attacking and disappearing into the woods before we can take any serious damage, but the third time we’re not so lucky. We’re all the way through the gap and on course to our target when the squatters attack, materializing out of the surrounding buildings to gun us down. Only a few light grenades, strategically tossed by a quick-thinking Trey, keep us from annihilation, blinding the enemy long enough for us to grab our stunned and make for the shield-line. They catch us again at the gap, where a pitched battle ensues, stunners exchanged for fists as the fight moves into closer quarters. Pursued through the shield and into the forest, it’s only when we lead them through a patch of raptors that we manage to lose them for good.
Ri is bleeding from half a dozen places, Gavin is still unconscious and slung over Trey’s shoulder, and Hegit has a ring of vicious bruises darkening around her throat by the time we arrive home. We stagger into the camp to a chorus of gasps and cries. Not that I blame anyone. Compared to the relatively benign-looking stun marks we’re used to collecting, the overt marks of brutality are disconcerting, even frightening.
Giving the team over to the competent hands of our medic, I brief the rest of the group on the mission, downplaying the seriousness of the injuries and assuring everyone that today’s snafu was just a minor setback. It’s not a total lie; while we failed at our mission and took some injuries, we didn’t actually lose anyone. The injured will heal, and the war will continue. Life will go on. More than a few people crack smiles when I tell them about the raptors. As speeches go, it’s not my best, but whether my words are believable or not, everyone wants to believe them, and that’s enough. Only when I’m safely ensconced in my tent do I give vent to the roiling anger that’s been pent up inside me for the last few hours. Grabbing one of the tip-pads off my desk, I hurl it at the wall with all my strength.
Whuumph!
Slag! Slag, slag, slag! How could I fall into such an obvious trap?!
I throw a second tip-pad, and then another, but the soft slapping sounds they make as they hit the tent wall do nothing to allay my frustration. What am I going to do? If all the gaps in the shield are guarded like this, we may never get into town again!
Tossing down the last pad, I stalk out of my tent. Immediately the sounds of sickness, of fear and pain, fevers and chills, rise up and attempt to overwhelm me. If anything, the reminder of our current situation just makes me angrier. In vain, I look around for something to do that won’t require me to talk to anyone. Noticing the water tank is almost empty—again—I grab the buckets and head off to the river.
Three trips there and back, and I’m soaked with sweat from head to toe. Slightly less angry, but still incredibly frustrated, I go for a fourth trip. I kneel at the edge of the stream and run my fingers through the river. Even the water feels hot, its sluggish currents lapping like small tongues of flame against my palms. Just the mere touch of it makes my parched tongue swell and my skin sweat. Dropping the bucket into the river, I stare out over the water. Black sap has dripped from the overhanging foliage above, and now even the water is slicked with oily pools floating down the current.
Plip!
An iotarian frog leaps through the water, jumping from a lily pad to a patch of sap to another pad. I blink, and for a moment it disappears. I glance back and forth, wondering where it went, only to finally spot it perched on a sap-slicked leaf nearby. A strange sensation comes over me as I realize how it eluded my gaze so easily. While once the frog was a simple bluish-green in color, now it has patches of black pigment spotting its skin, allowing it to blend in perfectly with the patches of black sap dotting the flora and floating across the water. In other words—
It’s evolved.
A sense of wonder fills me. I swear I saw this same type of frog just yesterday, and it still looked normal. That they could evolve so quickly . . . !
But that’s Iolanthe. She evolved to survive the terraforming, plants and animals adapting almost overnight to the changing atmospheric, water, and soil conditions, and now, after all this time, she’s doing it again. This frog isn’t the first spontaneous adaptation I’ve seen since the degradation of the forest began. Other species, all native stock, have suddenly mutated, morphing from old to new in an attempt to ride out the worsening conditions. Deprived of moisture, rovers have evolved to suck blood through their roots; cloudvines have developed translucent second skins to catch evaporating moisture and reabsorb it; and the Illyrian fungi have grown spines that can suck up dew from the night air. Solar-flits have begun eating those spines. Even the Iorats have made a comeback. I spotted one just the other day with a strange proboscis protruding from its mouth. As I watched, it used the sharp point to drill into a tree and suck moisture from its root. They’re all just doing what they have to do to survive, I know that, and yet something about the rapid-fire adaptations makes me uneasy, as if the planet is already in the process of moving on to its next evolution even as it leaves us behind.
It has certainly left the Tellurian stock behind. While once the Tellurian flora dominated the forest, now it’s failing, falling to its Iolanthian brethren and the worsening conditions even more each day. For every species that has successfully adapted, a hundred more are sick, dead, and dying, irrevocably tainted by the contamination that has subsumed this planet. As I look out at the forest, its foliage wilted and crumbling and its trees slicked with poison, the parallel between the planet and us is inescapable—that just as Iolanthe has been undeniably infected by the corruption that lurks within her gates, we too have become a part of the contamination.
A swish in the grasses behind me has me rising to my feet, my paranoia on full alert despite being safe in my own camp, until a familiar voice calls out, “It’s only me.”
Mario.
Back still to her, I pause, muscles tensing for a fight I really don’t want to have as I realize why she must have come. Briefly, I wonder if there’s any way I might dodge it, but I come up with nothing. At last, I sigh. “Did you come here to yell at me about today’s mission?”
“I brought you some dinner.”
At that surprising rejoinder, I turn around. Mario stands a few meters away, a bowl of rehydrated noodles in one hand and—wonder of wonders—a bottled coffee in the other. She must’ve been saving it, seeing as we’ve been out of coffee for weeks now. My face softens at this small token of affection, and not for the first time, I find myself wondering how she can both vehemently hate what I’m doing but still care about me at the same time.
“Thanks,” I say with a grateful nod, taking the food and drink and sitting down on the riverbank to eat it. After a moment, Mario sits down beside me, dropping her bare feet into the low-running stream beneath us.
“How are Hegit, Gavin, and Ri?” Mario asks after a moment. Not, I think, because she doesn’t know, but because she wants to make sure I know.
“They’ll be all right. Megumi examined them all and said no permanent damage was done. She gave them some painkillers and is watching over them just in case.”
I tense, wondering if this is when she bawls me out for letting them get injured, but she doesn’t say anything. A thought occurs to me. “Are the weapons—?”
“They’re safe,” she answers curtly.
I nod and take another bite of noodles. A minute passes, then—
“It’s a shame, what’s happened to this place,” Mario says with a gesture to the vista before us. “You know, when we first fled into the Rainforest, I hated it. Everything about it terrified me. Now I look around at this dying place, and all I feel is pity.”
“It’s too bad Iolanthe can’t fight,” I agree. “I don’t know if the net was sabotaged or not, but in coming here, the enemy has attacked her as surely as they’ve attacked us. From the very beginning, she’s been our greatest ally. If not for the Rainforest, we never would’ve survived the initial invasion, let alone everything that came after it. To see her like this . . .” I stop, unable to express the tragedy of it all, then continue, “She deserves a chance to fight back. If only it would rain. This drought is killing the forest. Even just one good dousing would do wonders.”
Mario nods, and we lapse back into awkward silence, our supply of conversation topics apparently exhausted. But then, after all that’s passed between us, what is there to say?
I finish my meal, washing the last of my noodles down with the coffee, but still Mario remains. With every minute of silence that passes, my unease grows, and I can’t help thinking that she’s just waiting for a chance to say whatever it is she came to say: to ream me out over today’s mission, or refuse to watch the weapons, or beg me to end the war. Unable to bear the tension anymore, I finally come out and ask, “What do you want, Mario?”
She doesn’t immediately answer, staring out longingly over the stream as half-light falls around us, before replying, “I want you to find peace.”
Peace! It’s the absolute last answer I expect to hear, and yet there’s something so Mario about her wishing something for me that I don’t even wish for myself!
My mind unwittingly goes back to those early days at camp, to those brief weeks when I was content to sit in the sun, and breathe the Rainforest’s breath, and watch the solar-flits flicker through the darkening evening. But that was a long time ago, before I chased an old nemesis into the woods, discovered the enemy’s operation, and realized that that path could never be mine.
I glance down at the bowl and bottle in my hands, a peace offering if ever I saw one. With a rueful shake of my head, I crumple the empty containers. “Peace was never meant to be my lot,” I tell Mario shortly.
Then, rising from the bank, I walk back into camp.
In the end, taking down the enviro-shield is easier than I expect. A small group of us sneaks up to the shield-line, deactivates the stun mines with some carefully thrown rocks, and stands guard while Mercury hacks the control panel just inside and uploads a homemade computer virus. Within fifteen minutes, the whole system has crashed and the shield is down. No time to waste, we destroy the panel and as many shield generators as we can reach while other teams stationed throughout the forest do the same. By the time the enemy knows what’s hit them, it’s too late. The shield is gone, and so are we.
Ecstatic at our success, I ask Mercury about using the virus on the spaceport shield. If it worked on one, why not the other?
Mercury merely shakes his head. “This was a decades-old enviro-shield; the one around the ’port is a military-grade security shield. It’s not the same.”
“What’s the difference?” I ask.
“You screw up the enviro-shield hack, and all that happens is the shield stays up. You screw up a security shield hack, and you could end up dead.”
Ah. I say no more about it. Merc’s my best hacker, and as much as I want to strike the spaceport, I can’t afford to lose him.
With the shield permanently offline, I immediately start planning our next offense, scrolling through possible targets and trying to figure out what might hurt the enemy the most. For some reason, my conversation with Mario lingers in my mind, and I find myself remembering my own words—It’s too bad Iolanthe can’t fight. If only it would rain. This drought is killing the forest. Even just one good dousing would do wonders.
The idea hits me like a bolt from the black. Maybe we can’t make it rain, but we can do the next best thing. What does any normal person do when their lawn doesn’t get enough rain?
They turn on the sprinklers.
The next day we sneak into the outlying homesteads, steal every bag of growth hormone we can get our hands on, and dump them into the terraforming reservoirs. That done, I queue up my access to the terraforming system on my chit.
*Enable Irrigation System?*
Shchh-tik-tik-tik!
Water shoots through the air as thousands of tiny terraforming sprinklers across the planet burst to life. I throw back my head and laugh. If the enemy thought the Rainforest was bad before, think of what she can do now that the enviro-shield is off. Iolanthe may be down, but she isn’t out. Not if I have anything to say about it.
Iolanthe has been unleashed.