The rest of the Alliance rebels—the few who were sent to the Surface with the Core squadrons—are rounded up from the holds of the other battle stations. Paley, Mal, and Jensen will join us on the invasion.
Seeing Mal again is strange. The first time we met, I nearly killed him, mistaking his ship for an enemy transport. Even after I learned he was part of the Alliance, I continued to doubt his allegiance to the rebel cause, especially when I was in the Crust work camp and all I saw of Mal was him playing the highly convincing role of a soldier working for the Developers. I couldn’t figure him out, so I wasn’t sure whether I could trust him.
I feel like I owe him an apology after everything, but when he sees me he makes no sign that he wants one. He greets me with a smile and a handshake, and thanks me for saving him and the other prisoners. So I forget about what happened before, smile back, and thank him for blowing up the quarantine facility in Crust.
Skylar is sprung from the cell the vul had put her in earlier. She’s in a horrible mood, having been stuck in a tiny room for nearly five hours after being gassed, but she grows more cooperative as we’re all thrust into helping with the preparations for the Core invasion. The vul have plenty of ships and warriors already armed for bombings and ground combat, but the rest of us have to be suited up in proper-fitting armor and given fighting gear. I’m given a handgun that’s much sleeker and lighter than Core models. It hardly feels heavy enough to hold much ammunition, but when I shoot it at a practice target, the pulse blast rips the target into a billion pieces. There’s also a “stun” setting. I’ll probably stick with that one, until Commander Charlie is the person I’m aiming at.
With an hour left until we plan to depart, Beechy, Skylar, and I go into a room with Hashima, Jehara, and four vul who seem to be some sort of army generals—kaarns, the vul call them. The vul have worked out a preliminary strategy based on what Hashima saw of the Core’s defenses in my memories. But Beechy is able to explain a lot more than I could show her.
The first step will be getting through the Pipeline. The plan is to bombard the tunnel from both sides of the Surface with as many raiders as we can, to make it impossible for the Core fighters to hold them off. Raiders will be sent through both Pipeline entrances on the Surface. Hashima has already made contact with her warriors in the Surface city so they can prepare.
By now, we have to assume the Developers have realized Skylar and I are the ones who stole the Core transport. They’ll have remembered I met with the Tessar, put two and two together, and assumed we were heading to the vul battle stations to alert them about the attack. They’ll be anticipating an invasion. They’ll have put every possible defense in place.
“We’re likely to run into security barriers they’ve set up in the Pipeline between the Surface and the Core,” Beechy explains. “Bomb lines triggered when an object passes over them, or electric fields intended to cause equipment malfunctions. They’ll be impossible to avoid.”
I frown at Beechy. “Wouldn’t the bomb lines damage the lower sectors?”
“Of course,” Skylar answers for him. “But they’re planning on blowing them up anyway, aren’t they?”
Hashima and the army generals were talking in vulyn, but now she speaks for the rest of us to hear: “We’ll send harmless probes ahead of us and trigger the weapons before we reach them. I’m sure there will still be casualties, but we are prepared for that. We’ll make sure the raiders on the front lines carry fewer of our warriors than the rest.”
Once the plan for the Pipeline is in place, we move on to arranging how the invasion will work once we reach the Core. The vul will storm the outer levels and capture anyone who fights them, using as little gunfire as possible. Uma, Paley, and Jensen will attempt to spread the word among the citizens that the vul are there to free them, not to harm them. They’ll also try to make contact with Lieutenant Dean, who should be doing the same thing. Beechy, Skylar, Mal, and I will make for Restricted Division with a small squadron of vul. We will break out the Tessar, along with any other people in captivity, before going after the Developers.
We’re down to five hours until the bomb’s construction will be completed. It should take us two hours, minimum, to reach the outer limits of the Core. That should leave us with less than three left on the clock.
If the Developers are smart, they’ll give up and surrender as soon as the vul warriors infiltrate their sector. Their bomb won’t work the way they wanted it to if the Core is overrun with their enemy. But knowing them, they’ll keep fighting as long as they’re breathing. We need to be prepared to do the same.
* * *
The other Alliance rebels and I board a raider with seven vul warriors, including Jehara. Hashima is staying aboard the Hessana to oversee the invasion from afar. She is prepared to direct the battle stations to fly farther out of Kiel’s range if everything goes wrong, to hopefully save all the people still aboard. If the clock ticks too close to zero without us overpowering the Developers, one of the vul kaarns will signal Hashima. But Hashima wants to do everything possible to conserve the fuel aboard the stations for the journey back to Marden, so it’s only a last resort.
I strap into a seat next to Beechy, behind the cockpit. His face is a mask of emotion, but I know underneath he’s worrying about what we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Before we left, he and I visited Sandy in the healing bay aboard the Hessana. She was lying on a mossy bed hooked up to monitors and an IV line. Her healer explained Sandy’s gun wounds had been closed up, and she had no more internal bleeding. But she’d need to stay on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy.
Sandy’s eyes fluttered open after a few moments, and Beechy’s eyes filled with tears. He went and sat down beside her, and the two of them held hands, sharing kisses and quiet words. I felt like I was intruding on their privacy, so I left after a minute. But I was happy to see that she and her baby were going to be okay.
“Sandy told me the name,” Beechy says, as our raider lifts off in the flight port.
“Of your baby girl?”
He nods. “We’re going to call her Grace, after Sandy’s mother. I think it’s a good name. Don’t you?”
I smile. “I do.”
“Sandy’s mother died giving birth to her, so she thought it would be nice to honor her that way,” Beechy says. There’s hoarseness in his voice. He’s still afraid he’s going to lose Sandy or Grace, before she’s born.
I reach out and squeeze his hand. “Grace will be perfect. You and Sandy will make wonderful parents.”
“I hope so,” he says softly.
The ship rumbles beneath us as our raider departs from the Hessana. I watch all twelve of the battle stations grow smaller and smaller through the porthole as we leave them behind. My passage to freedom, if we can stop the Developers before they blow them to pieces when they destroy Kiel. Soon the acid shield blocks my view of the fleet, and then they fall out of sight in their orbit above the atmosphere.
I turn away from the porthole and look out the cockpit window instead. The black shapes of hundreds of raiders fill the sky ahead of us like a cloud of insects. We’re approaching the range of snow-topped mountains. The same mountains where we were flying during the night the army of vul arrived. It seems a lifetime ago.
I fiddle with the pod-race coin I tucked into the pocket of my uniform, thinking of Logan when I saw him in the mayraan. Young Logan, the boy who was my first friend and my main comfort in the work camp. And older Logan, the boy who kissed away my tears last night and held me closer than ever before.
I’d give anything to hug him right now. I need to know he is safe. Hang on a little longer.
I look around the raider, at Jehara and the vul warriors sitting in their seats, poised and ready for battle. At Skylar, nervously chewing her lip in the chair on the other side of Beechy. At Uma and Jensen, talking in low voices. At Mal, unloading and reloading his gun, testing the weight of it.
At Paley, her eyes bloodshot and glazed with a mix of sadness and fury. She finally learned what happened to Fiona in the vul attack. I was afraid she’d be so angry with them—or me—that she wouldn’t want to come with us on the mission. But she told me she only blames the Developers, since Fiona would’ve been safe inside the Alliance compound if not for their orders.
I see the ghosts of Fiona and the other friends we’ve lost in the empty spaces between our passenger seats: Oliver, Laila, Buck, Cady, and too many others I didn’t know as well.
We can’t let the Developers make ghosts of any more of us.
* * *
The first twenty minutes of the flight through the Pipeline are silent, save for the occasional hiss and click of the vul warriors talking among themselves.
Out of the silence, there’s a faint booming sound that radiates through the tunnel outside. A bomb line must’ve been triggered.
I hold my breath, waiting for a message to pass through the comm system. It takes several minutes to come. Jehara translates it into Kielan for the rest of us.
“We’ve lost two raiders,” she says. “Pilots have been ordered to fly with extra care, to avoid the wreckage.”
“Did they not send the probes ahead to trigger the bombs?” Skylar asks.
“They did,” Jehara says. “But the reach of the explosion was farther than anticipated.”
Twice more, a faint booming sound reverberates through the Pipeline. Probes we sent ahead trigger two more bomb lines. Five more raiders are lost. With five vul aboard each ship, thirty-five vul warriors are dead before we’ve even reached the Core.
We’re almost to the end of Mantle sector when we receive word the ships at the front of the swarm have made it to the Core’s outer level. They fly into the first hangar they come to, as instructed.
“Our people are in,” Jehara says. “They encountered no soldiers in the hangar.”
I frown. The Developers know without a doubt the Core is under invasion now. Why wouldn’t they have stationed soldiers to fight us as soon as we landed?
Beechy has the same worry in his eyes.
“You don’t think they could’ve finished building the bomb already, do you?” I ask. My heart’s racing fast.
We should still have three more hours. But maybe construction went faster than Fred expected. The bomb could go off at any second and ripple through the walls of the Pipeline, blasting our raider apart. We’re not in the Core yet; we haven’t made it to the zone where we’d be safe. And we haven’t warned Hashima to move the battle stations away yet. They’d be destroyed, along with everyone on board and all the vul still on the Surface.
Sandy is still on board the battle station. Beechy’s knuckles are white, gripping his armrests.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But we need to assume the timer is up and the bomb could go off at any second. We need to find Commander Charlie and the other Developers and capture them as soon as possible.”
* * *
The vul pilot puts our raider down in the flight hangar closest to Restricted Division. The hangar is empty of people, like all the others. But in the upper levels, Core soldiers stormed the vul warriors in the nearby hallways. The soldiers had set up barricades and opened fire. It might just be my imagination, but I can almost hear the distant BOOM! of gunfire through the walls, and the pounding feet of the soldiers. I don’t know how many vul we’ve lost so far, or how many Core soldiers they’ve killed or captured. But chances are, there will be soldiers waiting to attack us in a corridor close to here.
I unbuckle and move outside the ship with everyone else in our group. Two other raiders have also landed in this hangar, adding ten more vul warriors to our count. We’re hoping the rest of the army can keep the fighting contained to the Core’s upper levels, while we break into Restricted Division unnoticed and go after the Developers.
“We need to find a comm and use it to contact Lieutenant Dean,” Skylar says, clicking off her gun’s safety. “See what he’s doing and whether he can help us. He might know where to find the Developers.”
She’s right. But we don’t have any comms besides the one on the vul ship, which doesn’t run on the right frequency.
“We know they’ll be somewhere in Restricted Division,” Beechy says. “The most likely place is the room where Colonel Fred is finishing his work on the bomb.”
“They could’ve moved it to a different location,” I say. In fact, I’m sure they would have.
“Where is the Tessar?” Jehara asks. “We should rescue him first and get him aboard our raider, in case the fighting turns bad. The savior must be returned to his people.”
“He’s in a laboratory on the way to the Core bridge,” I say.
“Let’s head there, then,” Beechy says, leading the way to the hangar exit. At the doorway, he signals us to stop, and checks that the corridor outside is empty. “All clear.”
I grip my gun tightly and follow the others around the corner. The hallway is quiet, save for the pounding of our boots on the linoleum. I tense as we come to the end of the corridor and another corner.
Again, Beechy stops us to check for soldiers. “All clear.”
All the soldiers must be upstairs fighting the vul, or downstairs defending the Developers.
There’s a staircase through the doorway ahead. Beechy leads the way inside. This is where we split up. Uma, Paley, and Jensen will go with five of the vul to the upper levels to deal with the Core citizens. The rest of us will go downstairs to Restricted Division.
“Good luck,” Beechy says.
“You too,” says Paley. There’s fierceness in her eyes as she starts up the staircase.
When the stairs end, Beechy pauses, listening through the door for a sign of anyone waiting outside. But there’s nothing but silence, and the faint echo of the others still climbing the stairwell.
Beechy carefully pushes through the door and steps out into the corridor.
We’ve made it ten feet when the blasters start firing.