Evolution (32 page)

“You don't want to shoot us,” Charlie says. He should not sound so calm.

Beechy laughs. “Oh, and why is that?”

“Because Colonel Fred has been ordered to detonate the contraption as soon as it's ready. The only thing that will stop him from destroying the outer sectors is a direct order from one of his commanders.” Now Charlie is the one laughing. His voice echoes through the room, over the noise of the battle going on outside.

Fury fills every part of me, knotting my veins and making my rib cage feel like it's about to explode. What he's saying is that this fight has been hopeless from the beginning. The Developers have stacked up all the cards in their favor. Even if we kill them, we're going to lose too much. The humans left on Kiel won't be enough to sustain a population.

“We'll shoot the other people in this room unless you call off the detonation,” Skylar snaps. “The people you wanted to save.”

“There won't be anyone left who is loyal to you,” Beechy says.

“You can shoot everyone in this room, if you wish,” Regina says with a slick smile. “We will still destroy the outer sectors.”

Silence hovers over the room as her challenge sinks in.

“Fine,” Skylar says, and shifts her weapon and shoots Cadet Waller through the head.

I gasp aloud, and there are cries around the room. Waller slumps to the ground. Blood seeps through the hole in her head and pools around her body.

Regina and Charlie barely flinch.

“Keep going,” Charlie says.

I'm still aiming my gun at Sam. I meet his eyes and see the realization churning through them: I could shoot Sam and Charlie wouldn't stop me. Charlie doesn't care whether Sam lives or dies.

“I told you he wouldn't protect you,” I say.

There's a flicker of fear in Sam's eyes. He thinks I'm really going to shoot him.

My finger hovers over the trigger, but I hesitate. Sam isn't my real enemy. His death won't save the people I care about.

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something lying on the ground. My eyes dart to it—it's the syringe full of orange control serum.

When I look back at Sam, he's noticing the syringe. Anger courses through his face, popping the veins in his neck. His eyes flit to Commander Charlie.

Charlie gives the command so quickly, I almost miss it: “Shoot the rebels.”

All around the room, the Core lieutenants and generals draw their weapons. Sam doesn't; he grabs the syringe from the floor.

The shooting starts before he can move toward Charlie. Laser fire fills the bridge. My guard lifts his gun, and I shoot his arm before he can get a shot in. The vul weapon has no trouble blasting through his armor at this close range. The soldier lets out a mangled scream.

I scramble to take cover under the hologram table, barely avoiding another blast near my head. At the corner of my vision, I see Logan fighting Dean at the bottom of the stairs. He broke free of Dean's grip, and he's struggling to knock the gun out of his hand. Screw taking cover—I need to help him.

But as I move to crawl out from under the table, a blast hits the wall behind me. I turn my head away, raising an arm to block my neck. Fragments of glass and metal impact my armor, and I cry out. I'm not hurt badly, but my ribs are on fire again. It doesn't help that I'm stuck crouching under the table.

When I look back at Logan, he's gone. The body of a soldier who must be Dean is limp on the floor. I hope that means Logan took cover, but I can hardly see through the smoke to tell where he went. Nor can I tell who's firing at whom anymore. I'm pretty sure some of the Core soldiers aren't shooting at us rebels; they're shooting at each other. They've turned against the Developers, like Sam.

Sam
. I've lost track of him and Commander Charlie in the madness of everything. I crawl toward the other end of the table, looking for them between the laser blasts.

There's a body on the floor at the end of the table, a few feet from Cadet Waller. Commander Regina's eyes are closed, and blood pools from her temple. She's dead.

Where did the rest of the Developers go? I don't have a good enough view from under the table. I crawl out of my hiding spot, raising my gun in case I need to fire.

That's when I see Sam catch up to Charlie. He's fleeing toward the door on the right-hand side of the room, the one leading to the security control room. Two lieutenants defend Charlie from gunfire on his left, but they don't notice Sam coming behind them, or they don't realize he's a threat until it's too late.

Sam lunges at Charlie, stabbing the syringe's needle at the exposed skin of Charlie's neck. The lieutenant to the left of Sam turns to stop him, but I take him out with a blast to his side.

Charlie punches his elbow back and knocks Sam's arm away. The syringe drops on the floor and rolls several feet. It's far away from me, but I can still see it's empty. The serum has entered Charlie's bloodstream.

He staggers, his face contorting with pain. I need to reach him and command him to call off the bomb's detonation. I hurry toward him, ducking as a laser flies in my direction.

The other lieutenant who was protecting Charlie shoots Sam in the leg, knocking him to the ground. The lieutenant looks up and I see who it is—Brand, from the strategy meeting. I aim at him and shoot, but Brand ducks and it hits a monitor on the wall instead, sending metal fragments flying everywhere.

“Clementine, get down!” someone yells. Beechy. He runs at Brand from behind, lifting his gun to fire.

But Brand turns around too soon. He fires his own weapon.

The lasers and dust and smoke around me become a blur. The only thing in focus is Beechy.

He falls onto his knees with a choking sound, blood gurgling out of his mouth. His gun slips from his fingers, clattering on the floor. His eyes meet mine across the room, wide and flooded with disbelief. And fear. For what seems like an infinite moment, he stares at me, still breathing, still fighting. Then his eyes roll back into his head.

Beechy falls face-first onto the ground, limp. He can't be dead. He can't be.

“No!” I scream.

The rest of the room comes back into focus. A laser flies at me, coming from Brand, and I barely duck in time to avoid it. Clenching my teeth, I raise my gun and aim at him. This time I don't miss.

I keep running until I reach Beechy. I drop to my knees beside him, feeling his wrist for a pulse. There's nothing.

Around the room, the fighting is letting up. Mal and one of the Core soldiers hold the other three Developers—Marshall, Talbin, and William—at gunpoint. There are a lot of bodies amid the smoke. I look frantically for Logan and find him in the corner of the room with Skylar. They're both crouching over the Tessar, who seems to have been wounded. There's a gun in Logan's hand he must've stolen from someone. He's alive, and that's all that matters.

Beechy is dead. But I can't think about that right now. Not until this is over.

I grip my gun as tightly as I can and get back on my feet, turning toward Commander Charlie. He's leaning against a table with his back to me, looking as if he's struggling to breathe. The serum is still taking hold.

“Charlie,” I say, and he turns around without hesitation. His eyes are becoming murky, hazy.

The sounds coming through the door leading out of the bridge tell me the war is still going on outside. Vul and humans are decimating one another. And for what? For old, ruthless tyrants who don't care about any of them.

“Call off the detonation and tell everyone to stop fighting,” I say. “You've lost. It's time to surrender.”

I hope Fred hasn't set off the bomb yet. I hope we're not too late.

For a moment Charlie seems to be struggling with himself, fighting against the serum's hold. But it's too much for him. His hand moves to his ear-comm and he switches it on, and swiftly gives the command: “Colonel Fred, abandon your previous orders. Do not detonate the device. I repeat, do not detonate the device. We have lost and we are surrendering to the Mardenites.”

I wait until I hear the buzz of a reply through his comm. “Does he copy?” I ask.

“He copies.” Charlie's voice is monotone, lifeless. “He will return to the Core.”

“Now, tell the rest of your people to surrender.”

Like a bot, Charlie moves to the wall to the left of the hologram table and flips a switch on one of the control panels. His voice spills out of a speaker in the ceiling. Everyone still alive in the Core will be able to hear him.

“Core soldiers, surrender your weapons,” he says. “The war is over.”

He flips the switch again and turns back to me. The color in his eyes is almost completely gone, replaced by the serum he created with my help and Logan's. This is what he would've turned me into, if he'd had his way.

I could let him live like this, trapped in his own body. An endless torture. But I'd always worry he'd find a way to escape from it. And I've lived too long in a world where I feared him.

No longer.

“Commander Charlie, you are charged with treason,” I say, and squeeze the trigger.

 

33

Most of the Core soldiers surrender immediately, as instructed, but it takes a long time for all the fighting to completely die down. Some of the soldiers in the uppermost levels, where the Strykers destroyed the wall speakers, didn't hear the announcement.

I stay in the bridge with Logan while Mal, Skylar, and Jehara lead vul troops through the other divisions of the Core to assess the damage and round up all the surviving citizens and soldiers. A jula who was among the vul army also remains in the bridge, to tend to the Tessar's wound from the battle. It is only a flesh wound; he will recover with time, and he will gain back his strength aboard one of the battle stations.

I leave Commander Charlie's body where it lies on the floor and kneel beside Beechy, carefully rolling him over. The warmth is already leaving his skin. I take his hand in my own, trying to squeeze the life back into it. But it's useless. He won't wake up.

Sobs shake my body and tears spill from my eyes. Logan wraps his arms around me from behind, and I press my head into his chest.

“He saved you,” Logan says softly. “You know that?”

Beechy distracted Brand so he wouldn't shoot me. But that doesn't make it any better. He's still gone, and I want him back.

I cry for a long time in Logan's arms, until my sobs become dry ones. Eventually I become aware that more vul have come into the room. Jehara and Skylar are back from going through the upper levels. They're joined by the other Alliance survivors—Paley, Uma, and Jensen—who luckily survived the fighting upstairs.

By their initial assessment, the vul army lost almost a quarter of their warriors here in the Core when the Strykers were detonated. We don't yet know the extent of the damage to their battle stations.

At least four hundred Core civilians and soldiers are dead, and the rest of the population remains subdued, not understanding what's going on. Fearing the vul have taken control to enslave or slaughter them.

It's time for us to explain the truth to all of Kiel's people and start rebuilding our broken world. I need to stay strong in the face of all this, as Beechy would've done if he'd survived.

I wipe my eyes and get to my feet.

*   *   *

It takes several days for all the citizens to be freed from the control serum. The vul administer energy injections to the people in batches, first to the Core nurses and the military men who'd been subdued, including Ariadne and Lieutenant Dean. The injections help speed the process along, making the people more aware and alert, but it takes some longer than others to wake up completely.

I visit Lieutenant Dean in the health ward when I hear he's awake. He's in a recovery room with ten other survivors, most of them soldiers who were wounded in the fight on the Core bridge. There are so many injured being treated in the ward that extra beds have been brought into many of the rooms.

Dean is sitting up in his bed, sipping broth from a bowl. There's a bandage around his shoulder, where Logan shot him with his own gun in order to escape him. Dean looks up when he sees me and smiles, but there's a pang of guilt in it.

“You did it,” he says. “I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. And I'm sorry I almost executed Logan.”

“It wasn't your fault,” I say. The same thing I told Ariadne when she came crying to me earlier today, apologizing for the things she did and said to me while under the serum. Of course I forgave her. “You were subdued.”

Logan explained what happened after I left for the Surface. Dean found him, as we'd arranged, and filled him in on everything I'd learned and what I was doing. The two of them decided to try to get their hands on energy injections to start freeing some of the civilians, but they were both caught in the act. Charlie didn't believe their cover story, since he'd already learned I'd escaped from the Core with Skylar. So he took Logan into custody and administered control serum to Dean.

“What's happening now?” Dean asks. “I haven't heard a whole lot.”

“We're in the process of waking up all the civilians. Everyone's being told what happened to the Developers, and how they were responsible for the bombs in the upper levels. Explaining the situation with the vul has proved a bit trickier. People have a lot of questions, of course, but it helps that most of them had some idea the Developers were controlling them while they were subdued, and they're grateful to be free even if they don't trust the vul. Tomorrow, Lieutenant Mal and a representative of the vul will make a formal announcement of peace. Then an election will be held for the civilians to choose new government officials.”

The bodies of Commander Charlie and Commander Regina have been burned, and their ashes were buried in the Hall of Commanders. The three surviving Developers and their military leaders were taken into custody. They'll be put on trial for their crimes, and the people will decide what happens to them. In the new government, a tribunal council made up of elected officials will make all the decisions. There will be trials held for crimes. No one will be shot or dragged away to a kill chamber by dictators.