Lem typed. “Understood. Leaving now.”
He waited for the message to send, then he logged off. His messages had passed through each of the ships in the bucket brigade as encrypted messages, so he wasn’t worried about those. But he had entered them as original text here. The system immediately had encrypted them, but somewhere on the memory drive was the original text. Lem couldn’t allow that. He took the surge device from the packet at his hip, plugged it into the system, and pressed the button, melting all the circuits. There were a few harmless sparks, a bit of smoke, and everything shut down.
Lem and Chubs found Felix back in the lobby near the docking airlock.
Felix was all smiles. “Mr. Jukes, I take it you were able to contact Luna?”
“It worked fine, thank you,” Lem said, extending his wrist pad. “Here, Mr. Montroose, allow me to pay you more for your troubles.”
Felix blinked, surprised. “How kind.”
Lem bumped the two wrist pads together, making the transfer, then Montroose read the sum.
“Mr. Jukes! My goodness. Thank you. This is most generous!”
“That’s probably two to three times what a new transmitter will cost you,” said Lem. “The rest of it you can use to pay some good technicians to install it for you.”
Felix was hardly listening now. He was staring at the numbers on his wrist pad.
Lem and Chubs floated into the airlock.
“He doesn’t understand,” said Chubs. “He doesn’t know we just fried his current system.”
“He’ll find out soon enough,” said Lem.
CHAPTER 18
Rescue
Bingwen stared at the place where Mazer’s aircraft had fallen below the horizon, willing it to come back up again. He knew it wouldn’t happen. He had seen everything. He had watched Mazer’s aircraft take the hit. He had seen the antigrav give out. He had witnessed it drop like a bag of rice out of the sky. A cluster of alien crafts had dived after it, firing at it, pounding it downward. Those ships had dipped below the horizon as well. But a moment later, they had come up and flown on. Mazer’s hadn’t. Instead, a line of black smoke rose, twisting upward like a charmed snake.
Bingwen sprinted back into the farmhouse. “They went down! We’ve got to help them.”
Everyone turned toward him. Grandfather shuffled over, hunched slightly. “Who, Bingwen?”
“The soldiers. The ones who brought us here. A new column of ships rose up out of the big disc. Hundreds of little ships. They’re everywhere. They shot down the soldiers. Their plane went down over there, to the south.” He pointed. “We need to get over there. They need our help.”
No one moved. The old woman who had given the soldiers clothes bowed her head and offered a prayer. The others looked worried and defeated again. The small light of hope the soldiers had given them was extinguished in an instant. Grandfather put a hand on Bingwen’s shoulder and kneeled in front of him. “There’s nothing we can do, Bingwen.”
Bingwen recoiled a step, shrugging off Grandfather’s hand. “They saved my life.” He turned toward the others. “They saved all of our lives. Aren’t we going to do something?”
No one spoke.
Grandfather’s voice was calm. He reached out again. “Bingwen, listen—”
“No,” Bingwen said, jumping back. He took a few steps away, facing everyone. “We can’t leave them out there to die.”
“If they were shot down, they’re already dead,” said another of the women. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“We don’t know that,” said Bingwen. “They might be hurt. I saw where it went down. I can take us straight there.”
The old man with the bag of clothes said, “They said they would be coming back. They said they would send help our way. Doctors and supplies. Now help won’t be coming.”
“He’s right,” said his wife. “No one is coming with supplies now.”
“Is anyone even listening to me?” said Bingwen.
“We listened, boy,” said the old woman. “You told us what we needed to know, now let the grown-ups talk for a minute.”
The teenage girl was at the open windows, looking down at the valley below. “Look,” she said, pointing downward. Everyone came over. Bingwen muscled his way to the front and looked down. Several of the alien aircraft had landed in the valley and opened their doors. Aliens were stepping out into the rice fields, shooting out mists from their backpacks. The rice shoots withered and turned black as the mist wafted over them. The aliens were over three hundred meters away, well out of earshot, but the old woman spoke in a hushed tone anyway. “That’s the mist the soldier spoke of.”