19
The brutal pace quickly exhausted them both, their lungs burning while Orville loped along with an effortless gait. He weaved through the trees, sensitive to accidentally creating a path, while his long youthful fur whisked up and down like miniature whips as he bounded along. Molly lost herself in the sight of them as she fought to steady her breath. Her broken arm jounced in its sling, thrumming with pain.
Orville came to a sudden stop in a section of the forest no different from the rest. He looked around himself in every direction while Molly and Cole bent over, huffing. He reaching down into the leaves and pulled up a patch of the forest floor, hinging it away neatly. A dim light floated up from the square hole; Orville waved them down first.
It was a simple ladder, but the descent felt as dangerous for Molly as the one that had broken her arm. The rungs were spaced over a meter apart, their diameter too big for her to properly grasp. With one arm strapped and useless, she was forced to employ her chin, pressing a knee against the side rail as she adjusted her grip. Cole tried to descend beside her, steadying her back with one hand and giving her encouragement as Orville shouted at them to increase the pace. It seemed to take forever to get to the metal floor below.
Metal. It was jarring to see something modern on Glemot. The ladder, the lights, the floor—they didn’t prepare her for what awaited as she turned around.
They were inside a long rectangular chamber carved out of the dirt and lined with metal panels. Along one entire wall stood a massive row of consoles with readouts that reminded Molly of SADAR units, and stations that resembled cockpit controls. A large tactical table dominated the center of the room, and a solitary male Glemot hunched over one of the stations. He turned to appraise this intrusion, pulling a wire from one of his ears.
When he saw Orville step off the ladder behind them, he nodded, replaced the wire, and turned back to his work. Molly glanced at Orville and saw fury in his eyes; she followed his gaze across the room. Edison huddled in the far corner, bound and gagged. The poor pup’s eyes were wild with fear, his fur bunched around the restraints.
“Your nefarious plan is uncovered, brother.” Orville marched toward him and twirled his sharp stick. Primal fear surged through Molly, the weight of the jungle floor pressing down from above. They were a couple of puny humans in a lair full of monsters. Could the plan work with Orville rather than Edison? Would she even want it to? She couldn’t imagine allowing Edison to be harmed just so they could get off this planet.
She turned to Cole, who practically vibrated with nervous energy. The only thing going for them was the adult’s distraction. The important activity on the screen ahead seemed to require more attention than the squabbling of cubs behind.
Orville was halfway across the room, walking by the tactical table. He spoke to the screen operator. “The plot is far simpler than we thought, Mentor, but the cunning exponentially greater than my brother’s falsehoods. A mere maneuvering for stature, nothing beyond.”
Oh, gods, thought Molly, this was Orville’s mentor, the anti-tech council member! The only way out of this room was going to be with Edison dead and their plan ruined. It would be a mad dash deep into the woods as their promises to both tribes met on tomorrow’s battlefield and were destroyed.
Orville’s mentor turned away from his screen for a moment to look back at his protégé. “End him.” He stated it like the solution to some playful riddle.
Molly took a step back, reaching for Cole to pull him toward the ladder.
But Cole was no longer there.
She watched in horror as her friend rushed off to his death.
????
Time slowed as Cole raced to the tactical table and threw himself up to the top. He ran by Orville, who stopped and turned, seemingly confused. Cole scooped up one of the battle pieces off the table; it looked like a painted metal figurine of a tent. He figured it would be useless against Glemot hides, but maybe it would help him unlock the only weapon in here they could use.
He leapt to the ground on the other side of the table, still moving at full speed. Ahead of him, Edison cringed back into the steel wall. He seemed unsure of which of these approaching figures meant him more harm: his brother with his large stick or the strange alien rushing him with an improvised dagger.
Orville roared from behind, obviously realizing what Cole had planned. The Glemot pup lurched after him, bringing his stick up high. Cole dove, crashing into Edison and hacking at the rope around his arms, not concerned at all about harming the pup. Edison’s arms strained against the fibers, a few vicious slashes and they parted. His freed paw struck out at Cole, knocking him roughly to one side. He slammed into one of the consoles, drawing the attention of the adult. Orville’s stick swished the air where his head had just been, barely missing Edison’s face.
The room filled with a confused silence as each combatant sized up the others. Cole noticed Molly rushing toward the brothers, her one arm still trapped in a sling and useless. Orville was readying another blow with his massive stick while the adult attempted to untangle himself from his station, yelling at both pups to stay where they were.
The adult was the biggest problem. Literally. Cole knew he’d be ripped in half by the monster, so he pushed off the console and charged into Orville, choosing a foe closer to his size. Tackling a bear would’ve been easier. Cole tried to hang on as the enraged child thrashed, clawing at his back to tear him to shreds.
Molly arrived at full speed around the clear side of the tactical table. Cole tried to shout her down as she threw herself into the air, bringing her heels into the back of Orville’s knee. The pup crashed down under Cole’s weight, the stick pinned beneath him.
Edison pressed off the wall and rushed past to meet the charging adult. They crashed into each other with a boom, the rage in the youth enough to match the elder’s size. Molly wrestled with one of Orville’s arms, trying to keep it pinned back, as Cole launched a series of blows at the cub’s skull. The strikes stung his fists, but he wasn’t sure the angered youth even felt them. He looked up to see Edison gouging at the elder’s eyes, the two locked in a fight to the death.
Orville howled beneath him and lifted his shoulder, sending Molly flying back toward the table. With a thud, Cole drove a knee into the bundle of fur. Orville just pushed his bulk from the ground with Cole still on top of him, wearing him like a cape. His massive stick whizzed through the air, narrowly missing Molly’s head.
Cole screamed and reached around for Orville’s eyes, but the pup shrugged him off his back like an afterthought. Cole felt a massive paw wrap around his knee before he was tossed into the metal wall. He collapsed in a heap and fought for his senses. Molly yelled something; he looked up to see the sharpened stick, like a battering ram, hurtling toward his abdomen. He fell flat and the deadly log exploded against the steel in a bloom of splinters.
Orville howled with rage.
Cole pushed himself up, wrapping his hands around a fragment of wood the size of a baton and sharp as a dagger. Orville looked down for what remained of his weapon and Cole obliged by shoving the shard right into the pup’s eye.
The room rumbled with the sound of pure fury. The other two Glemots stopped clawing each other to see what had happened. At the sight of his wounded protégé, the adult let out a roar of his own. He tossed Edison aside with a shiver of rage and took a step toward Cole.
????
Molly was already backing away from the terrifying creature when Cole turned to her. “Run!” he commanded.
She stumbled toward the ladder, the sound of thunder echoing off the steel around her. Cole caught up, steadying her as they rushed past the tactical table. Molly glanced over her shoulder to see the adult thrashing toward them, striking the wall with his fists as he went, mad with fury.
Running to the ladder filled Molly with the dread of a living nightmare. She was trying to climb a fence and feeling the bad thing at her back. She knew it would get her, but she had to scramble anyway, her arms not working.
Fear traveled up her spine; she jerked her arm out of the sling and grabbed rungs, one after the other. She kicked and fought her way up. Every time her right arm took its share of weight, Molly had to bite down on her body’s urge to pass out. Each rung brought pure torture.
The ladder was wide enough for Cole to come alongside her, just as they had descended. They were over two meters up, scrambling as fast as they could, when the adult reached them. He yanked Cole down first, his arm banging on a rung at her feet. The Glemot raised both paws to pulverize him into the ground. Molly didn’t hesitate. She launched off the ladder and wrapped both arms around the creature’s neck. The adult peeled her off and cast her aside, tossing her violently into the wall. A wall of fur flashed before her, Molly tensed for death, but it was Edison joining the action, a large fragment of splintered wood in hand.
Molly flinched as he crashed into the larger alien, driving the shard deep into the Glemot’s side. The adult’s howls deepened and strengthened. Edison stabbed again. And again. The injured beast swung his arms and stumbled back against a console, looking at the blood on his fur, pawing at it confusedly.
The fear on the adult’s face knotted Molly’s stomach. They were not battling a trained warrior—this was a politician. Pity stirred, then recoiled from her rising wrath. This was the sort of beast that killed with calculations, concocting war and disease and wiping out millions from the safety of a council meeting. She wanted to launch herself at the wounded thing and peel its flesh.
But Edison beat her to it.?.?.
????
The aftermath made her want to vomit. Molly had been trained to kill, but from a distance. A puff of fire and a cloud of silent debris was as close to death as she was ever meant to be. The hand-to-hand courses at the Academy were a formality, designed to instill confidence and build muscle.
They’d never prepared her for this.
The council member was dead—his blood everywhere. The tangy scent of it filled the air; Molly could taste it like the metal of a dry spoon. At the other end of the room, Edison and Cole subdued the injured Orville, tying him up in Edison’s old restraints.
Molly tore herself from the gruesome sight of the dead Glemot and made her way toward the others, drawn by Orville’s howling. At the tactical table she paused, reaching up for a metal figure, the one resembling a pointed tree. It looked to be the sharpest.
She gripped the painted metal in her left hand, her right arm out of its sling and limp with pain. She remained unaware of it and paid no heed to the disarray of her robe as it barely clung to her shoulders. She approached Orville and lowered herself to her heels, clutching the tree with white knuckles.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. She reached down and raked the metal point across the fabric of her robe, cutting off a wide strip from the hem. The hunk of wood had already been removed from his eye and blood matted down the fur on half his face, dripping with the universal red of life in contact with oxygen. Molly folded the fabric up into a pad, making sure a clean portion was left on the outside. She pressed it to Orville’s eye and looked to Cole for help, hoping he’d understand why she needed to do this.
Cole nodded and tore a long strip from his own robe. “For you,” he told her. “Not for him.”
Orville’s face displayed no gratitude, but his angry panting subsided. The youth seemed resigned to his fate, whatever it would be.
Edison.
Molly turned to see how he was taking all of this. After flaying the elder and rushing to secure his brother, the pup had collapsed into one of the station chairs. His eyes were focused on a blank spot on the opposite wall. He could have been catatonic or calmly planning for world domination—it was impossible to tell.
Orville began testing his restraints for a weakness while Cole stood over him warily. Molly rose and walked over to Edison, placing a hand on his shoulder, the fur sticky with sweat and much else. There was a lot of blood on him.
On all of them.
“The plan is still viable,” he said calmly. He broke his gaze away from the steel plating and looked into Molly’s eyes. “The great imbalance remains a possibility.”
Molly couldn’t think about it clearly. There was too much horror down here. She needed to get out and breathe some fresh air, to think about what had just happened and what it meant for their immediate future.
“I have to get out of here,” she said.
Neither Cole nor Edison tried to stop her. They just looked at each other: breathing hard, sweating, unknowingly forging the bond that only battle welds. They sat like this as Molly made the slow and painful climb.
Up and out.
????
Cole spoke first. “What do we do with your brother?”
“He remains incarcerated here. We secure the hatch mechanism from without.”
“Where’s the EMP?”
Edison shrugged and looked side to side. “Here, somewhere.” It seemed like a guess.
They began pulling panels off the cabinets and below the consoles; they rapped the walls. Orville seethed with anger but they didn’t waste time questioning him, Edison assured Cole that they could only expect delaying lies.
Edison shoved the tactics table to slide it out of the way and get to the consoles on the other side of it. The top hinged up instead.
“Located,” he said.
Cole had to hoist himself up and rest his stomach on the lip of the open chest to look inside. There were two large EMPs nestled in individually padded compartments. Each looked extremely impressive, complex enough to pass for a much more dangerous device when presented to the Leefs.
“Are you sure they won’t know the difference between an EMP and a nuclear bomb?” Cole asked Edison.
The pup smiled at this. “Trust me completely, Cole. Ascertaining the difference will be impossible for them.”
Cole smiled back. There was still a chance this could work.
????
In the corner of the room, Orville groaned to himself. He thought back to the plan his brother had spilled and realized the horrific truth of it all. He wanted to scream but he knew it would serve no purpose. He was better off down there, anyway.
Of that, he was sure.