CHAPTER 50
Talinn squinted into the pale sunlight between her and the cave mouth. Waves roared behind her, the distance mitigating the sound to more of a distant jet’s backwash. She glanced up reflexively, but there were no forces of any kind on this side of the planet.
Alivan had been home to several growing colonies eighty cycles ago, before IDC forces and five separate natural disasters had caused the UCF to withdraw. The civilian population dropped precipitously, and IDC dumped their bad investment not long later.
Talinn might have appreciate the history lesson if it hadn’t been delivered by an echoingly immense voice in her head.
THEY DIDN’T GET EVERYTHING. TAKE THE COORDINATES. USE WHAT YOU FIND.
Ignoring said voice was not an option. Months might go by before it took notice of her again, but it had tuned into the frequency left vacant by Bee. If she didn’t run the length of her designated course, it would find her and enact whatever consequence caught its whimsy.
Better to see what it wanted her to see, and decide what to do about it once she had the information. Cautiously though—nothing to say the coordinates were truly meant to be a help, rather than a consequence for some mystery transgression of the past. Talinn knew better than to assume.
She’d stood between battering ocean and stoic cliff face for a too-long stretch of time, reminding herself not to assume. Salt had woven itself into her synthetic hair, and the fine sand had worked its way into her coverall. With a sigh, she unclipped her goggles from her belt and fastened them in place. She dialed the LV, accepting the headache that would meet her later as a better alternative than walking blind into a cave. Her alien contact was a shitty benefactor, but “use what you find” had been tempting enough to send her all this way.
After a fair amount of adjusting for distance and light differential, Talinn got no closer to the details within the cave, but she did make out a carving in the red-brown rock. A lighter scar, the edges blurred by her long vision or time, but the picture still clear enough. A stylized port.
The machinists, here?
She considered for another stretch of time, then shrugged and marched forward without bothering to unholster her weapon. Though she stopped at periodic intervals, her goggles couldn’t penetrate the depth of the cave. Instead of striding straight on, she angled her approach—the lack of cover made that functionally useless, but she could pretend at caution. At the least, it would make Caytil feel better when she reported back.
The cave itself proved to be enormous, a potentially human-made cavern to tuck away goods until a cargo ship could land in the broad strip of flat land between water and rock. The walls were smooth, the ground nearly paved to smoothness, but, truth be known, Talinn noticed these details only peripherally.
Neither did she notice she’d sucked in her breath and held it, not until the hollow space in her chest twitched in protest. Her throat tightened over the air she finally expelled, making a sound she forbore to notice.
After too long a moment, she forced herself to blink, but the image before her didn’t shiver into a heat wave of self-delusion. Unchanged, a battalion of tanks remained in formation, staggered in front of her and spread into the far reaches of the cavern. She had a hundred questions and none, and no way to deal with either extreme.
She eased the tension in her jaws, spat out blood before she realized she’d clamped down on the inside of her cheek, and allowed herself a count of five before she got to work.
Conditions recorded and notations made on everything left behind, Talinn tromped back to her airboat in the dark. She’d brought supplies for an overnight, but the moment she touched her pack her hands shook so violently she couldn’t open it. Even an alien shouting through the soft underbelly of her brain couldn’t make her stay in that cave. Not with the tanks.
The tide was in or out, the water rough or lapping, but one way or another her boat followed its course. She stared at the golden-red moon until it sank too low, then fixed her eyes on the bare line of hazy gray that separated water and sky far ahead. She blinked or slept, and the blur resolved itself into the lights of Alivan’s remaining settlement.
Relatively small, she reported to herself. Concerns itself with algae cultivation, some tourism when the front moved far enough away, for long enough. No idea aliens sent her to find a trove of long-abandoned weapons that would most likely work once the right moving pieces moved into them.
“Ziggy will be happy,” she said, letting the wind rip the words away from her. Maybe the algae would hear, and care. She forced herself to visualize Caytil’s face, but she couldn’t make the image smile. Instead she leaned over the side of the boat, heaved into the air over the water.
That passed, and she blinked or slept again. The stretch of lights separated into individual points, and she aimed for the tallest column, which presided over the public docks. The series of colored lights up and down its length blinked steadily, a pattern she couldn’t interpret.
“Something about weather?”
Neither wind nor algae answered, and Talinn composed her report in her head, eyes steady—if unseeing—on her target.
Her blinking target.
A pattern.
A specific series, one that made everything under her rib cage lurch perilously forward, beating against the bars.
Her eyes raced a beat ahead of each light’s flash, even as her sluggish brain resurfaced, forcing understanding.
The pattern.
Bee, sticking out her metaphorical tongue.
The sound couldn’t be heard over the wind, but she felt in her chest, down her arms, through her feet against the vibrating deck.
For the first time in cycles, Talinn laughed.
Bee was still out there. Closer every day. They were the pincers of a ground assault, and between them they would crush their enemies.
Apart and together.
They had work to do.