The Marine uniform was gone. In its place he wore his Kreelan ceremonial armor, the great rune of the Desh-Ka a flame of cyan on the black breast plate. The talons of his gauntlets gleamed blood red, reflecting the crimson light of the tactical display. The great sword given him by Pan’ne-Sharakh was sheathed at his back, and at his waist hung the short sword Tesh-Dar had entrusted to him, along with the most valued of all his possessions, the dagger that had been his gift from Esah-Zhurah. On his upper left arm clung three shrekkas like lethal spiders.
“Do not be frightened,” he said in a voice that none of them had ever truly heard before. It was not the voice of a company commander. It was the voice of a king.
“Why… why are you dressed like that?” she asked. He looked exactly as the warriors in the tomb must have before they died. She shivered involuntarily.
Reza smiled thinly. “I have worn the Marine uniform with honor for years,” he told her. “I will not wear it while I am under suspicion of such acts as I have been accused, for that would be to disgrace all who wear it honorably.” He looked at the others. “Thorella has always treated me as the enemy, as a Kreelan warrior. I do not wish to disappoint him.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do, Reza?” Hawthorne asked quietly as the command post guard shouted that Thorella’s people were waiting.
Reza turned to him. “Get our people off this planet if you can, my friend. But do not trust Thorella. He will try to destroy all of us to eliminate the evidence pointing to his crimes.”
“What about Enya?” Eustus asked, in a way ashamed of his concern for her when he had an entire company of his own people to look after. But he could not help it any more than he could still his own heart.
Reza put a hand on his shoulder. “I swear that no harm shall come to her from Thorella’s hand, my friend. I cannot make the same promise for when the Kreelans come, but Thorella shall not harm her.”
“And what of my people?” Enya asked quietly, bitterly. “Belisle will murder them, finish what he tried to do five years ago.”
“I cannot see the future,” Reza told her softly. “But we shall do what we can.”
He looked around him then, at the people who had been his friends and fellow warriors for so long. “Go with honor, my friends,” he said simply. There was no more time for good-byes.
After a quick embrace and a last kiss from Eustus, Enya turned to follow Reza through the dark tunnel to the even darker world beyond.
Thirty-Four
“What is that thing, Gard?” Thorella asked as he stared at the blue glow streaming from the crater, pouring its light forth into space. He could see the movements of his regiment’s skimmers and tanks as they took up their positions around the city and partway up the ruined mountain. He and a few of his most trusted troops had come in first to deal with Gard and Savitch, landing over the horizon and coming overland in a skimmer to avoid detection. The rest of the regiment had been landed soon after Gard had been taken into custody. Thorella would have liked to kill him straight away, but his sponsor had convinced him that a gory show trial, followed by Gard’s execution, would be much more satisfying.
Reza remained silent. He would kill Thorella, no matter what the cost, he had decided, but the time had not yet come. He had also decided to kill Belisle, as well. Despite Nicole and Jodi’s best efforts to educate him that society alone was best left to judge the crimes of others, he knew that it was not always so. These two men had committed murder and would continue to do so with impunity unless he stopped them. Too much power lay behind them, power that lurked in the shadow of the pillar civilization had built to Justice, power that crushed its victims without remorse, without compassion; the laws of society could not reach them. For Bayern and Morita, killed by fellow Marines; for Melissa Savitch, who had answered his call for help and died for her trouble; for the Mallorys who had died and those who would soon die, he would kill Thorella and Belisle. He was the only instrument of Justice that might prevail. He alone could avenge the fallen.
“You know,” Thorella said quietly, “you could be a bit more cooperative. I would hate to see Ms. Terragion accidentally abused during her interrogation.”
Reza said nothing, but kept staring at Thorella, who sat behind a wall of armorglass. Reza retained his weapons because no one dared challenge him for them, and Thorella was content to let him have his way, as long as he himself was safe.
So you believe, Reza thought, imagining the look on Thorella’s face if Reza stepped through the wall, as he easily could. Part of his mind was with Enya, who sat in a large interrogation room downstairs with a number of her friends. If Thorella decided to go ahead with his threat, Reza’s period of waiting would be over.
“No,” Thorella said after a moment’s consideration. “The only women you ever cared about were Carré and Mackenzie, the frigid bitch and the dyke. Maybe I’ll make Ms. Terragion my mistress while I’m here. That would make Camden happy, I know. At least, until it comes time to execute her.” He smiled. “You’re going to the gallows, Gard. You know that don’t you?”
“I shall not go alone.”
Thorella laughed. “No,” he said, ignoring the implicit threat, “no, rest assured that you won’t. There will be plenty of Mallorys swinging beside you. But that’s beside the point.” He leaned closer to the glass. “I just want to know what that thing is out there, that could chew up half a mountain. We’ve probed it and run drones around it, and it doesn’t even register. Some kind of Kreelan energy source?”
You could say that, Reza answered silently. “I have nothing to say to you, Markus Thorella.”
“Guards!” Thorella suddenly barked. Six of Thorella’s best men, Reza’s guard force, stepped forward from where they had their weapons trained on Reza’s back. “Put him with the others. If he tries anything, kill them all.” That was what Thorella believed would be an effective tool to enforce his will on Reza: the threat of death to the others.
As he turned to leave, Reza glanced again at the unearthly glow of the mountain.
Soon, he thought. Very soon.
“We’re starting over it now, sir,” Emilio Rodriguez reported as he began to turn his skimmer over the top of the glowing crater. He had been circling it for ten minutes, gathering more information – which meant no information, he thought sourly – before actually flying over it.
“Hurry it up, Rodriguez,” Major Elijah Simpson, the regiment’s intel officer, snapped. Many said that his intelligence was directly proportional to his patience. He was a very impatient man.
“What an asshole,” Lauren Nathanga, a tech from the regiment’s intel company who was Rodriguez’s passenger, said over the intercom.
“No arguments here,” Rodriguez sighed.
Their little jeep crossed over the lip of the crater about one hundred meters above the glass-smooth rim.
“This is really incredible,” Nathanga said. “The power it must have taken to do this, and yet we don’t have a single reading except some residual heat from whatever cut through the rock.”
“Anything yet?” Simpson interjected.
“Still scanning, sir,” Nathanga replied, shaking her head. “We’re… What is that?”
“What’s going on?” Simpson demanded over the radio, but neither Nathanga nor Rodriguez heard him.
The two explorers had suddenly found themselves encased in a web of blue light that seared their flesh. They thrashed and writhed, screaming in agony as their skin began to burn, as if they had suddenly been cast into a furnace. The last thing Lauren Nathanga saw was Rodriguez’s smoking body bursting into flame. Then Nathanga was herself consumed by the cleansing fire.