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19
THULIAK
“Ski Lodge…” her voice crackled again. “Ski Lodge…”
Then the crackling sound got louder, and Airlock’s voice stopped entirely.
I glared at Menkor, the nerd who was operating the radio for me. “Nerd,” or the Proto-Khetar “Thayvus” before it, was a term the scions and warlords had used to dismiss Khetar who were less included to battle and breeding. Now the term had gained power. Khetar who had hidden their interest in the sciences before, for fear of being called a Nerd of Thayvus, now proudly called themselves nerds. I’d soon realized that nerds were the thing I needed the most of, as they had squeezed every last ounce of extra material and technology out of the dyingWrath.
“I…” he said, “it’s not like a Hivemind connection. We can’t tell if she’s still there or not.”
“Why did she leave without saying goodbye? What is a ski log?”
“To your first question,” Menkor said, “it’s likely their radio ran out of power, or maybe there could be some atmospheric disturbance. Either way, we’ll have to wait until the next scheduled time to try again. To your second question, I believe it’s a ‘lodge,’ a place where you can stay while doing some kind of snow sport.”
“Airlock will recharge the battery?”
Menkor frowned, telling me that it was not a battery one could recharge. “Scion, I don’t know. You told me to always give you accurate information. I don’t know what happened on their end, but we will try again.”
I nodded. “Understood. Check for atmospheric disturbances.”
I was worse at math than Tschenkar. All the nerds were absolutely destroying him below deck when it got out that he had attempted to use his fingers to manually sum numbers together. I’d done this as well, but fortunately no one had seen me. Now it felt necessary to hide my ignorance. As soon as I was on the surface of Eden and we could rebuild a networked information system—or if I could find some paper books—I would undo my ignorance, but for now, I needed to hide it to keep the respect of my nerds, who I assessed now as more important than even my fiercest warriors.
I didn’t even know what an “atmospheric disturbance” was or how it could possibly stop a radio wave. Didn’t radio waves travel through space? Could a cloud really stop a radio wave?
Then the “red” alarm went off.
Without the Hivemind, we’d begun color-coding various alarms. Red—the color of blood—was decided as the most urgent alarm color.
In this case it had a pre-determined meaning: It was time to land.
I rushed from the lair—what the nerds were calling the lower decks—to the bridge in record time, and I burst into the bridge barely winded, as I’d been running from the bridge to the lair quite often in these final weeks.Wrathwas dying, and it was good to see more of him in his last moments.
“Report,” I barked.
Almost all of the screens and instruments were on. We’d been running dark most of the time. AsWrathdied, his overall power output declined rapidly. To run the entire bridge like this must have been using up over half of the remaining output. We were truly in the ship’s last moments.
I’d pieced the plan together from the figures on the screen—diagrams of ten-thousand Khetar in egg-shaped pods floating through the pirates’ dragnet like grains of sand, then peppering through the atmosphere, landing us one Khetar at a time onto Eden’s surface. When Thuros, one of my newly designated “squad leaders” explained the plan aloud to me, it was mostly filling in details I hadn’t yet pieced together. I may not have been able to add numbers together on my fingers, but I was no idiot.
“Scion,” Thuros said, “the pirates are adjusting the net. It’s time.”
I nodded. We needed to get through before they added more ships and more mines. The pirates were realizing that new packships landing new Khetar was more dangerous than the mostly disorganized Khetar already on the surface, which couldn’t even “touch the G-spot,” which is what the nerds were now using to mean “retake Ginsburg.” Tactics which insulted the sexual prowess of our warriors helped fuel bloodlust for battle, so I did nothing to stop such insults.
“Full report.” Thuros pulled all the diagrams and figures together. “Each Khetar in a pod.”
“There are only 10,000 pods on this diagram.”
“We’ve already had enough volunteers to go down withWrath. It’s settled.”
My chest tightened, and my heart sunk, but there was no time to argue it now. The Nerds had crunched the numbers, and for very obvious reasons I could not argue with their math.
“The pods spread,” he said. “We’ve decided on 75% directly at the G-sp—at Ginsburg, Scion—and the remaining 25% sent to the outskirts. These forces can be used to cut-off the Pirates’ likely retreat, while also protecting women stranded outside the city.”
We both knew that Airlock was one of those women. “Change it to a 65/35 split,” I said. “According to Tschenkar and Airlock, I expect theInseminatorsto be a more valuable asset than we originally assumed. I don’t want the human men to scurry into the mountains and fortify there like roaches. It could take a century to crush them all. We slaughter them all right now.”
He nodded, but I could tell he didn’t agree. Fuck him. I trusted Airlock, and to a lesser extent, I trusted Tschenkar. 65% of our forces dropped directly into the G-spot would be enough to take over the city, especially with most of Tschenkar’s pack ready to break through the pass.
In the cities other than Ginsburg, where Tschenkar had deployed a sizable chunk of his pack, similar battles were taking place. Juliai and Thessanaca had been retaken fully by theHarbingers, though the forces Tschenkar deployed to two other cities fell to the pirates. Still, I’d decided to focus the rest of our resources on Ginsburg, as the pirates were directing their reinforcements there as well.
