Born of Sand (Tales of a Dying Star Book 5) (17 page)

His expression must have been obvious, because Kari rounded on him with a touch of defensiveness in her tone. "We had to search all over just for these. The batteries don't last long baking under the dunes for years. Most have cracked and split in the heat. We were lucky to find any at all!"

On the ground, Dok ripped apart the plastic covering on the outside of a battery, revealing the metal casing underneath. He lifted it over his head, examining it from all angles. Sand fell into his eyes and he coughed and winced.

Farrow put a hand on Kari's shoulder. "It is fine. Shit, better than fine. Every battery is a great victory, more than we had before." Gently, he pulled aside the shoulder strap of her shirt top. "You've burned."

She swatted away his hand. "Saria boils hot this week. The attack. Is there any news? More specific dates from Akonai?"

"Nothing new. I suspect we won't know until the day it occurs, with as little warning as possible."

Kari lowered herself onto a nearby stool and bent forward, rubbing her hand over her bald head. A scattering of sand drifted down to the floor beneath her. The men with her stood against the wall, clothes soiled with sweat, but Kari appeared relatively fresh. "You will tell me the moment you know anything?" She looked up and struck him with her brown, nearly gold, eyes.

"Of course," he said.
Though with Akonai, we may not receive any notice at all.
It would be a cruel joke to abandon Victory Base entirely and never give them the signal. A joke Farrow could picture Akonai laughing heartily at.

The intensity suddenly left Kari's eyes and she shrugged. "I will be prepared, either way."

"Wrong," Dok suddenly blurted.

"Excuse me?" Kari said.

Dok rose and carried the battery to them. "This one is wrong.
Wrong
." He held it up to Kari's face like a weapon. "See?"

Surprised by his fearlessness, Kari leaned back and put a hand on the battery. "What am I supposed to be looking at? It's a DK-2, like you said."

"The positive terminals are missing. Ripped out. Did you even try to be careful with them? These are valuable parts, not knives to fling around!" He strode back to the pile.

The entire outburst shocked Kari. "Not so shy anymore, is he?" she muttered.

Farrow smirked. "His temperament has improved. It seems being out from under Bruno's thumb is good for him."

"Three of the batteries are similarly damaged," Dok yelled, bent among the parts.

"I liked him better before." She turned to Dok and said, "So repair them. The terminals are just two small prongs of metal sticking out."

Dok let out an exaggerated sigh. "I
can't
repair them. The terminals aren't just on the surface, they go all the way into the core. They're inserted before the battery is molded around them. Once ripped out, they cannot be replaced. I instructed you to be careful with them!"

"We
were
careful. The batteries were like that when we salvaged them."

"So your incompetence lies with the choosing of the batteries, not the transport of the batteries?"

Kari rose and pointed an angry finger at the small man. "No. You told us to look for models DK2, DK3, and DK4, on batteries that showed no sign of external damage. You described such damage to us: cracks in the casing, leaking chemicals discoloring the metal. That is what we looked for, and what we brought back."

"And basic battery functionality! How can it function without terminals?"

"You should have specified that then," Kari growled. "We paid close attention only to what you told us to seek."

"Because I thought it was
obvious
..." Dok said.

Farrow closed his eyes while they argued. Four batteries, four more electroids. None perished in the trip to the graveyard, but the risk had yielded little return.
Will anything go right in this star-damned war?

As if to punctuate the thought, the groaning sound of massive metal gears announced the opening of the surface door high above. Everyone scrambled back to avoid the cascade of sand. Dok struggled to drag the cloth of batteries out of the way, muttering under his breath the entire time. Kari put her hands on her hips and stared murder across the room.

Before the doors had fully opened, a vehicle appeared in the gap and began descending. With a triangle-shaped base and a sharply-angled glass shield on the front, the sand cruiser looked like something raced for sport. Hob sat in one of the two seats, maneuvering the vehicle down to their level and then across the room to land in one of the open bays.

At a glance Farrow could tell it had no cargo.

Bad news begets bad news
, he thought, pinching the bridge of his nose. Four batteries acquired out of the forty they had needed. Whatever hope he'd had disappeared. Dok may have repaired a few of their ships and electroids, but despite that they were in hardly a better position than when Akonai left. A meager number of men and machines, hopelessly weak against the formidable, coordinated Melisao.

Mira stood next to him, watching his face. A leader needed to keep up a strong face for his men and women, but Farrow couldn't muster the energy. "We're going to have to send more scavenging parties out," he said as Hob dismounted from the cruiser across the room. "All of us will need to go."

Kari's face darkened. "Eight was bad enough, but more than that will surely bring the stingers up on us."

"It doesn't matter," Farrow said, defeated. "We've shit choices. Either we attack with our current strength and be slaughtered by the peacekeepers, or try to acquire the batteries we need and get butchered by stingers. Or do nothing at all, hiding in our crumbling base, and suffer the wrath of the shitting
Children of Saria
if they return."

Kari said, "We could..."

"We could what?" he snapped. "What the shit can we do? Tell me, I'd be overjoyed to hear a plan, Kari, because I'm all out of ideas. Charge the peacekeepers with knives, like some group of courageous maniacs? Win the war in hand-to-hand combat? Politely ask them to ground their Riverhawks, abandon the orbital blockade, and allow us to retake the planet with a smile and a handshake?
Tell me your fucking plan, Kari!
"

The room had grown quiet during his outburst. Mira and Dok stood to the side, shocked. The cluster of other scavengers shifted uncomfortably.

Kari stood very still, her face a mask as she stared at Farrow. Her hand hung next to her knife, the thumb twitching briefly.
You've a knife and I've a gun
, he thought, tucking his thumbs behind his belt,
and I know that my draw is faster.

But it was Binny that knocked Farrow out of his rage. She moved at the edge of his vision, by entrance to the workshop. "Farrow!" she hissed, a mixture of surprise and scorn.

Guilt washed over him. Losing control of his emotions around Kari or Mira or any of his men was bad enough, but Binny's disappointment he could not bear. He slumped as all the tension left his body. "I..."

Mira stepped between him and Kari. "We're all upset," she said, although she seemed more nervous at interjecting than anything. "Let's discuss what to do after we've calmed down. When our heads are cool."

"Yeah," he said, running a hand through his hair. Kari still stared at him, so he looked at his toes. "That's a good suggestion. We can come up with a new plan tomorrow, when I've had time to think."

Hob finally finished putting away the cruiser and approached them. "Time to think about what?"

"What to do next. Kari salvaged four batteries from the graveyard, and I'm assuming you couldn't acquire any in the city?"

Hob grimaced, a motion that scrunched up his red, windburned cheeks. "Visited two of our foreman friends. Neither are willing to take any additional risks. After the shootout at the Station, with dozens of renegade, weaponized electroids, the peacekeepers are afraid of any materials getting out. They've tripled the patrols at all factories to that end. The Governor has even sent part of his own palace guard to see that no electroids escape."

"Wonderful news," Farrow said. "Maggy will be happy to learn she won't be getting new packages of grain any time soon." Food was one resource they could not manage without. He added it to the already towering list of problems they needed to solve.

"Oh, I didn't even think about food," Hob said. "Yeah, that's bad, I suppose..."

"Bad," Farrow agreed.

"...but those aren't the only security measures the peacekeepers have taken." For some reason Hob seemed excited at that.

Farrow barely suppressed a groan.

"One of the factories, number twelve, is being dismantled. It was one of the ones most corrupt, according to the peacekeeper tallies of missing parts. That factory produced electroids sent to the ore mines to the west, to supplement the Praetari workers there."

"So they're shutting down one factory," Kari said. "What of it?"

"I didn't say they were shutting it down," Hob emphasized. "I said
dismantling
. They're preparing to move the factory to another location entirely."

"I fail to see the importance of that distinction," she said.

"Rather than build those electroids in the city and transport them to the mines--a process which has any number of vulnerabilities along the way, and allows for several layers of corruption--they're going to erect a factory outside the mines and build the electroids right there, on-site."

"I'm not sure what you're suggesting," Farrow said. "We can siphon electroids from this new factory at the mines? That's hardly ideal; the mines are guarded just as well as the city, if not more." Not to mention the factory would probably not be operational for several months. By then it will be too late.

"What I'm suggesting," he said, "is that we attack them while they transport the supplies to the new factory." His eyes sparkled. "Their freighters are passing within fifteen miles of Victory Base. A freighter is moving electroid material
tonight
."

Chapter 11

The corridors swarmed with men and women carrying supplies out of the armoury: rifles and pistols, plated armor, bags and bandoliers full of spare energy packs. Farrow moved through the apparent chaos like a stinger through the sand, making sure they gathered everything needed. They would be taking half their strength, the largest single maneuver they'd ever attempted.

"The only part that concerns me is how we can shoot it down," Hob said. "We'll need to use two, maybe three of our Riverhawks. But the freighter will see them coming in the sky. It won't be able to stop them, but it will tip off the rest of the Melisao on Praetar as to our strength. Once we do that, they'll know we have the ships."

Farrow smiled at that as he opened a crate and removed his personal rifle. "Dok fixed our two anti-air lasers. If we reach the interception point in time, we should be able to set them up and swat the freighter out of the sky no problem."

"They'll still be able to send out an alert..." Now that they had accepted his plan, Hob seemed suddenly cautious and conservative.

"Dok fixed the radio jammer too," Farrow said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. "Only took him ten minutes. Once the freighter is down they'll be as mute as a tongueless whore."

Mira chuckled at that while helping a Freeman load his pockets with ammunition. Farrow gave her a grin.

"Oh," Hob said stiffly. "I've no complaints with the plan, then."

Farrow realized what was bothering Hob. He put a hand on the engineer's shoulder and said, "Dok is brilliant with weapons, but he's too analytical, and has a poor social temperament."
Especially lately
. "You've done a wonderful job bringing this opportunity to us. That's more valuable than anything Dok has done so far."

It wasn't entirely true, but Hob beamed and left to busy himself preparing. When Farrow had a chest full of ammunition he made his way down the corridor too.

"So they've been transporting electroids to the mines all this time," Mira said, following behind.