40The unleashing of Iolanthe is more successful than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Maybe it’s the five hundred kilos of growth hormones we dumped into the irrigation system, or maybe it’s simply the water itself, raining down over the planet after days of drought, but whatever the exact cause, the results of our campaign are unassailable. Iolanthe has come suddenly, strikingly to life.
Within hours of our little maneuver, color has already begun coming back to the Rainforest. Yellows and browns are replaced with vivid greens as new leaves quickly take the place of dead or dying foliage. Shrubs burst into sudden bloom, goaded into unexpected maturity by the unnatural saturation, and seeds of all kinds drop like wildfire over the forest floor to burst from the ground in a panoply of new growth mere hours later. And that’s only the beginning. As the days pass, every plant in the forest, from tree to shrub to vine to flower, begins to grow and grow and grow . . . and grow.
Trees lengthen and swell, their limbs clashing and colliding as they vie for what little space is available in the ever-shrinking understory, while far below, their roots fight a similar battle for the dirt. Vines snake across the ground like thick tentacles, twining up trees and falling from branches in verdant walls, interspersed with ferns, shrubs, and other ground cover, all undergoing their own spurts. Even the rivers aren’t immune to the staggering growth, plants bursting from the banks in slick tangles to overtake their rocky shores. Before long, the entire jungle is bursting at the seams, and with the enviro-shield down, there’s only one place left for it to go.
The settlements.
Iolanthe doesn’t need to be invited twice. After years of being forced to grow up against the shield, the Rainforest is more than ready to take her due. She invades from every angle, sweeping into town from the outside and overwhelming it from the inside before the enemy even knows what’s hit them. Power grids go out, roads are blocked, and whole buildings are threatened by Iolanthe’s rampage. Even once the enemy figures out the cause and shuts down the irrigation system, it’s too late. Iolanthe has been released, and even without the constant flow of water, the forest keeps growing, unfurling across the world with unfettered abandon.
I watch its progress unfold with obsessive glee, feeds from my drones continuously scrolling across my palms lest I miss a single moment of the glorious devastation. The academy, the main highway, the auxiliary spaceport—with every thrust, grim satisfaction burns hotly within me. With every target taken, the flames of my hatred are only stoked higher. It’s as though Iolanthe’s vengeance for all the ills visited upon her has somehow become my own, and perhaps it has. For what is Iolanthe but a mirror of myself?
It’s a mirror I dare not look too closely into. Instead, I focus on the task at hand—taking down the enemy. After weeks of malaria raging through the camp, Megumi finally managed to find a drug that, while not curing it, has managed to allay most of the symptoms. With everyone more or less back on their feet, I’m determined to press what advantage we’ve gained while we have it. For two nights, I sit up late at my desk, making plan after plan, and yet nothing I come up with—raid, sabotage, ambush—feels like enough. I want more. My plan to nibble away at the enemy one bit at a time was all well and good when we began, but time is ticking, and despite all the damage we’ve levied—the stolen supplies, the smashed solar panels, the sabotaged pumps and exhaust vents and water filters—the enemy is still going strong. We need to do something big, but what?
For the millionth time, my eyes go to the big three: the terraforming bunker, the spaceport, and the hydroelectric dam. Successfully hitting any one of those would have a huge impact on the enemy’s operation, seriously stalling or even permanently derailing it. The question is, how? As far as I’ve been able to determine, either the security is impenetrable or the targets are just too big.
With a sigh of frustration, I go back to my other plans, bouncing back and forth from one to the next. When the tent flap rustles a while later, I’m almost glad to have a distraction.
“You’re up late,” I greet Zane, with a nod to the rapidly falling blackness outside. “Here, take a look at these plans and tell me what you think.”
“Forget that,” he orders, brushing my tip-pad aside and proffering his instead. “I’ve got something better!”
Arrested by the unaccustomed excitement in his voice, I take the pad and activate it. A still from a survey drone pops up over the screen.
My heart falls. It’s the shuttle I found in the woods all those weeks ago. Though it’s overgrown almost to the point of invisibility, there’s no mistaking the scored gray carapace showing through the greenery. Seeing as I deleted the original footage, I can only imagine how much recon he must have done with an SD to run across it.
I don’t immediately reply, but simply stare at the footage, considering my answer. Oblivious to my silence, Zane continues, “See, it’s a shuttle, and only a day’s walk away! I ran across it accidentally while doing drone sweeps earlier today. It’s so overgrown that I missed it the first time. Luckily, I decided to review the feeds again . . .”
Enthusiasm unabated, he continues to rattle on, and with every word he says, my heart only sinks further.
“. . . see, with this shuttle, we could escape! No more hiding in the woods—we could get off this planet for good! You, me, the others . . .” His voice trails off as he finally notices I’m not saying anything. A pall falls over the shelter, then—
“You already knew about it.” Not a question.
I word my answer carefully. “I did happen to come across the shuttle some time ago during my scouting sessions.”
“Some time ago? Exactly how long ago was that?”
“I don’t know. Several weeks, I suppose.”
“But . . . you didn’t say anything!”
“There was no reason to,” I explain. “It’s hard to see under all the flora, but that shuttle is significantly damaged. Just getting it off the ground at all would’ve been a long shot, let along getting it off the planet.”
“Don’t you think we all should’ve had the chance to look at it and decide?”
“You mean, look at it and then argue for weeks about it?” I counter coldly. “I evaluated the shuttle and made a command decision. I didn’t see any reason to get everyone’s hopes up for nothing.”
“I see,” he says in a tone that makes it patently clear that he doesn’t see.
“The whole thing would’ve just been a huge distraction,” I add, hoping to make it better.
It makes it worse.
“A distraction? We had a chance to escape, and all you saw was a distraction? From what? This war? This impossible campaign against an enemy fifteen times our size?”
“It’s not impossible.”
“I knew this war was a bad idea from the get-go,” he plows on, “that the Specs were too powerful and the risks were too great, but I believed in you. You’d gotten us so far already, and more than anyone else, I trusted you to make the right decisions—for all of us. Time and again, I had doubts about what we were doing, but I always brushed them aside, convinced you would see us through, and you always did. But to find out after all this time that you’ve been hiding the existence of a potential escape craft? Never in a million years did I think . . . !”
“If you trusted me then, then trust me now when I say that shuttle is a dead end,” I fire back. “As for the war: I gave you an out, if you’ll recall. I said you didn’t have to fight. I said you could sit it out. If you had so many reservations, then why even fight at all? Why watch drone footage and look over plans and go on raids when at any time you could’ve taken yourself out of it all? Why?”
“Because I love you!”
My jaw drops. Whatever answer I was expecting, that explosive declaration was not it. Utterly speechless, I can only stare at him with unconcealed stupefaction.
Agony in his eyes, Zane stares back at me, clearly as surprised to have made the declaration as I was to hear it. Frozen in place, he waits for my response. When it doesn’t come, he tentatively offers, “I thought . . . that is, you’ve always been so . . . perceptive. I thought you must have at least . . . guessed . . . my feelings for you.”
My throat goes dry. “Zane, I . . .”
My voice falters and dies as I realize I don’t have an end, or even a middle, to that statement. Zane continues to wait, gazing at me with such fragile hope in his eyes that I suddenly find it impossible to breathe. What the hell does he think he’s doing, throwing a declaration like that at me without the slightest warning? Of course I had no idea how he felt! I’ve been trying to foil a full-scale Spectre campaign, not looking for a date to the prom!
Panic unlike anything I’ve felt since the day of the invasion starts to bubble up in my chest. I’m fighting a war that may very well decide the fate of humanity, and now I’m suddenly expected to deal with . . . feelings?
Panic morphs into indignation, and then anger—so much anger. At Lia’s suicide and Dad’s death, at Mom’s years-long absence and Michael’s alienation, at the Specs invading, and even at the whole slaggin’ universe for always making everything so damn difficult!
Kicking back my chair, I rise to my feet, demanding, “What do you want from me?”
“Want? I don’t wa—”
“You want us to hold hands and take romantic walks through the woods and go to the Spectre prom together?”
“No, I—”
“We’re in the middle of a war, in case you haven’t noticed! A war for the fate of humanity. I don’t know what you thought you were going to accomplish by telling me this, but if you think I’m going to drop everything I’ve worked for just to indulge whatever little fantasy you’ve built up about me in your mind, then you’re completely vacced!”
All the color drains from Zane’s face. The light goes out of his eyes, taking every trace of hope with it, and in its place is a strange sort of realization, as though he’s only now just seeing me—the real me—for the first time. Not the confident general I put on display for all to see, but the ugly, scarred, self-obsessed girl who hides, terrified, beneath her.
A muscle tenses in Zane’s jaw, and I wait for him to unmask her, to reveal her flaws for everyone to see, but all he says is, “I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. Maybe, deep down, I was just afraid that if I didn’t tell you now, I might never get the chance.”
Silence hangs over us for one long, terrible moment. Then with a quiet thud, he sets the tip-pad with the shuttle feed down on the desk and leaves the tent.
Completely decimated by the quiet explanation, all I can do is stand frozen in place and watch him go. The anger is gone now, replaced by a sick feeling lurking deep in the pit of my stomach.
Slowly I sink down into my chair. Unable to deal with everything I just heard, I do what I usually do in such cases: work. Grabbing the tip-pad with my plans, I reactivate it and try to review the data, but my hand is shaking so hard I can’t see a thing. Oh stars, what have I done?
Thrusting it away once again, I put my head in my hands. Zane’s tip-pad still sits at the edge of my desk—a tacit promise to not divulge my dirty little secret. Did he leave it because of his feelings for me, or because he believed me when I said the shuttle was a no-go, or because deep down, he knows:
We’re embroiled in this war far too deep to ever get out now.
Drawing my legs up, I hug my knees to my chest and stare at that tip-pad, wondering if maybe, just maybe, I didn’t make the right choice all those weeks ago.
I don’t sleep for a long time.
The world is quiet when I awake. Too quiet.
Lifting my head from my desk, I stretch my shoulders and take stock of the room. Only the faintest trickle of light, more of a suggestion than a reality, whispers through the walls of the tent, cutting the darkness just enough to allow the barest contours to take focus. At the far end of the tent, Vida sleeps, a quiet tumble of black curls and soft breaths. Everything is normal. Everything is as it should be. And yet . . .
My heart ticks up a notch, and I sit up in my seat, suddenly reminded of another night four months ago when I awoke at my desk in the dark only to find my world was about to end. It was the sirens that woke me then, screaming through the halls of the academy to warn me of my encroaching doom—not like now. Now all I have is quiet. Too much quiet.
Rising to my feet, I slip out of the shelter and walk slowly through the deserted camp. But for Avelaine, whose pale wisps are just starting to rise over the horizon, everyone is abed and presumably asleep. Everything is exactly as it should be, and yet . . .
Something is wrong.
I’m not sure how I know; I just do. The peaceful façade lying over the camp is just that—a façade. A barely sketched veneer covering a world that is somehow not at peace.
Slipping back into my tent, I do what I always do when I return: I check my feeds. My heart thumps. The outer perimeter drone is down.
A trickle of fear seeps through me. Activating my chit, I attempt to get the feed going again. When that doesn’t work, I try to fly the drone back here. Still nothing. It’s completely unresponsive to my commands. Switching over to the middle perimeter drone, I send it out toward the outer drone’s last known position. Maybe I can use it to locate the first—find out what happened, walk out, and bring it home for repairs. I watch the feed carefully as the drone flies silently through the trees, closer and closer . . .
The feed winks out.
The trickle of fear becomes a flood. One drone down is a mechanical issue.
Two is an attack.
For a few brief moments, the world seems to stop, held in abeyance as comprehension fully sinks in. I’ve always known this day would come. Despite what I promised Mario and the others, I always knew that one day we would go too far, hit the wrong target or destroy the wrong facility, and the enemy would come looking for us. Now that day has come, and we have only one choice left to make.
Fight or flight?
For a long moment, I stare at my chit hand, all too aware that whatever choice I make could mean the difference between life and death. Then, queuing up the link, I text everyone the two words I hoped I’d never have to use.
Battle Stations.