Read Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) Online
Authors: Edward W. Robertson
Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) (36 page)
"We're almost there."
He kept his hand on the knife in his pocket, keeping both eyes out for the deranged or outcast people who liked to call the crypts home. After a series of turns, he came to a blank wall. He flipped out his knife and stuck it into a crack in the beige bricks. The knife caught, springing a latch; a door seemed to materialize in the stone, swinging inward without a sound, releasing a puff of musty air.
The hallway beyond had no graffiti. No trash. Nothing but a few brown water stains and patches of green mold.
"What is this place?" Rada said.
"We're not sure. Could have been for smugglers. Or maybe the original architects built it into the station just in case. Whatever it was for, people don't use it much anymore. But it's there, if you know where to look."
They passed a series of doorless, empty rooms, shoes whispering on the grainy rock. Ahead, the tunnel terminated in a final room.
"We used to come down here when we were little kids," Ced said.
"You mean last month?"
"Years ago. Not long after we'd been sold to the crews. Kansas and I came here to escape, if only for a few hours."
He stepped into the room, shining his device across it. One wall was painted with blues and greens. Fields and mountains, streams and seas. Sloppy transitions, abrupt changes in perspective, and shifts in paint shade showed where one patch had been finished and another begun, but the mural was continuous, filling the wall from corner to corner. The work was all shaky lines and squashed shapes, but rather than feeling embarrassed by his amateurism, it made him want to smile.
"I made that stuff," he said. He pointed to the opposite wall. "That was Kansas."
This wall started with blacks and reds. Monsters with long claws and shadowed faces. Bodies lying awkwardly, great pools of blood beneath them. These images were as childlike as his: on some of the figures, one leg was twice as long as the other; grimacing mouths extended past the border of the person's head.
Where Ced's drawing had shown a single consistent world, with one section more or less the same as the other, Kansas' wall shifted a third of the way across. The red diminished. So did the monsters. Instead, one section showed spaceships zipping toward a distant star. Another painting showed a blond girl standing on the top of an apartment tower looking down on the streets. In another, she held hands with a man and a woman. Soon, the blond girl was punching out grown men in blue uniforms, or blasting a hole in the wall of a prison cell, or kung fu kicking an alien that had grabbed a young boy in its tentacles.
After a while, though the particulars changed, they all showed the same thing: the blond girl leading a group of kids out of a dark place and into a light one.
"You said when times get tough, people become whatever they were before," Ced said. "Well, this is the person I've always known."
Rada moved past him, touching the wall. Her fingers moved over the years-old paint as gently as if it were a newborn chick, but her expression was completely unreadable.
* * *
The kid led her back up to the street. He offered to show her home, but she told him she'd manage. Alone, she walked in the vague direction of her apartment. After three or four blocks, she messaged Toman. She'd hardly gotten her device back into her pocket before it pinged.
He wanted to see her. In person. She called up directions and took the tube to his building, a glassy spire overlooking a park. He opened the door before she could knock. Though it had been less than two weeks since he'd lost his home to homicidal invaders, he smiled readily, and as he led her to the balcony, his steps were as springy and fluid as a dancer or a fighter.
"Surprised you got back to me so fast," Rada said. "From the sound of things, you're so busy you can hardly remember your own name."
"I am never too busy for my people." He leaned against the railing, a two hundred foot drop yawning below him. "Especially you."
"No need to flatter me. I'm back on the job."
"Should I bother to ask what brought you back? Or is this one of those Secret Rada Things?"
"We've taken things this far. People have put themselves in the lurch for us. They're counting on us. We can't hang them out to dry."
"Agreed. But even the champion has to rest between fights. If you get back in the ring when you're hurting, you'll only make it worse."
"Good thing I'm a fast healer." She found herself grinning. "Besides, I have to face facts here. If I'm not swimming, I'm drowning."
Toman laughed, glancing away. "Well,
I
certainly wasn't going to be the one to call you a shark. Next question: would you prefer to wade in a step at a time? Or dive right back into the deep end?"
"Depends. Where can I make the biggest splash?"
"There's a lot that needs to be done right here at the Locker. Admiral Carruth assures me that her fellow crews are happy to partner up with us, but after the recent hostilities, I'm not convinced the leaders will be in lockstep. Wouldn't hurt to pay them a visit. Give them a better idea of what we're all about."
She moved beside him, propping her elbows on the railing. "Got anything else? I'm not feeling super diplomatic at the moment."
"The first of my Motion Arrestors are on their way here right now. Our pilots are going to need training. Ideally from someone who's actually used them before."
"I could do that."
"But you'd be less than thrilled."
"I can teach them a few tactics," she said. "But I think we need to revamp our entire strategy. When we tried to retreat, FinnTech's MA-equipped fighters nearly destroyed us. They would have, if the Locker hadn't intervened."
Toman began to pace across the balcony. "Oh, it runs deeper than that. Generations of engines are weaker than we're capable of making. There was no reason to go bigger—parts of the ship couldn't handle it, to say nothing of the comically fragile human bodies inside them. But if we're no longer restricted by biological frailty? Then we have to rethink what starships are capable of."
"I wouldn't have much wisdom to impart, then. Everything I know is about to fade into history."
He looked at her, then glanced away quickly.
"That was an idea," she said. "An idea that you stamped out. Isn't your motto 'Every idea must be heard'?"
"
I
heard it. And decided it was awful."
"That just makes me want to hear it more."
He pressed his lips together. "I can't ask you to do this. Not after everything I've put you through already."
She turned to face him. "I'm a grown woman. How about you let me decide for myself what I'm capable of?"
"Surprised it hasn't occurred to you already. It's kind of the elephant in the room."
"Those."
He nodded. "We barely know anything about them. Even if we're able to fend off FinnTech, it won't mean anything if a new species means to invade us."
"Whatever you need. I'll do it."
"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of."
"We can't let ourselves be stopped by fear," she said. "Not when what's out there means to destroy us."
She moved back to the railing. Above, the artificial lights in the dome's curve presented them with a bright, sunny day. It was easy to forget that, on the other side of that thin shell, there was nothing but darkness.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Thanks for making it this far! The next book in the REBEL STAR series will be out in a few months. In the meantime, please consider leaving a review. Those are a huge help.
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MORE BY ME
The REBEL STARS series is set in the future of a great apocalypse. If you'd like to read about the apocalypse itself,
you can find the first books here
. My other books, including the epic fantasy series THE CYCLE OF ARAWN and THE CYCLE OF GALAND,
are available here.
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