“Go!” he yelled at her, shocking her into action.
Visibly crying now, Scyant got out of bed and hastily pulled on her dress. Yen noticed now that her dress seemed a poor cut for her body, hardly accentuating what she barely had to begin with. She turned as though to say something venomous in response, but froze, her mouth agape, when she met Yen’s evil stare. Turning, sobbing loudly, she rushed to the door and fled out into the hall beyond.
Yen leaned back into bed, his mind racing and a battle being fought along his nerve endings. He cringed in pain, knowing that sleep would be hard to find tonight. A thousand other thoughts crossed his mind — that he needed a shower to wash her smell from his body, that he had a meeting with Merric and Captain Hodge tomorrow to discuss upcoming strategy, and, most importantly, that he truly did miss Keryn’s touch — but he lacked the conviction to do anything about any of his thoughts at the moment. Instead, he reached over and remotely turned off the lights in the room, sitting in blissful silence and cradling his head against the wracking pain within.
CHAPTER 13:
All was quiet now in a city once teaming with life and activity. Not the sort of quiet one normally thinks of. Not silence, but a solemn hum of death and defeat, a murmur of subjugation. The sun had been gone from Miller’s Glen for two long weeks and a bitter and unforgiving cold had settled across the city. The dropping temperatures dumped more than two feet of snow over the ruins of the once bustling trading city. Buried beneath the snow lay metal and glass like assassins’ daggers, waiting patiently for the clumsy or tired to collapse upon their blades. The stone and exposed girders protruded from the snow like giant’s fingers, probing the surface of Othus.
Beyond the city, the jungle had quickly withered and died. Without sunlight, the proud green leaves had faded to brown before passing quietly in the eternal night and falling forgotten to the ground. The undergrowth that had once hindered movement now laid shriveled, mere shadows of its former self. Where once the lush green jungle had stood now lay a graveyard of foliage; the skeletons of trees twisted idly in the frozen wind. The world had died, a stark reflection of life within Miller’s Glen.
Following the invasion, the Terrans had herded the survivors of the bombing to the far side of town from the spaceport crater, far away from the barracks established for the Terran soldiers. Their new homes, in which once lived a single family, now housed dozens of men and women. At night, the floor was littered with the bodies, people too exhausted to make their own space and too cold to complain about the body heat.
By daybreak, loudspeakers, barking orders for them to dress and gather for the day’s labor, roused the homes. Marched day after day into the heart of the city, the survivors slaved and died, trying to clear away the rubble and bodies of those who had been lucky enough to die in the explosion. Those who hadn’t managed to collect warmer clothing to protect themselves against the arctic winter. Some died of exposure; they collapsed into the snow and disappeared under the surface, their blood as frozen as the ground. Others dug under the snow with numb hands, not noticing that blisters spread and tore open, only to be replaced by more.
Bundled with coats stolen from one of the surviving shops in the central part of town, Keryn, Adam, and Penchant stood in the frozen wasteland and watched as the Terrans paced back and forth while they supervised the clearing of the old city. The Terrans stood confident, their bodies warmed by the insulation within their combat suits and their weapons bristling with deadly energy. Reaching down, the trio moved a rock or two into an awaiting cargo truck, hovering a few inches above the snow surface.
The invasion force had said little after the destruction of Miller’s Glen. They had made their point when they dropped two plasma bombs on the city. Little more needed to be said after that. Conversation between the trio had been light immediately following the invasion as well. They had gathered their belongings in sober silence and moved quietly through the streets, ignoring the cries of the wounded and dying. Even then, the temperature had started dropping, leaving the damp air cold and the wind strong enough to cut through their thin jackets. Passing through the ruined towers of the business district, they found stores with wares openly displayed in the windows and bodyguards long since gone, either from the destructive explosion or from fear. They had smashed open windows, stealing the thick wool jackets that they still pulled tightly across their bodies and the insulated boots on their feet.
Keryn reached down and dug through the snow as a Terran passed close by. Moving a large stone out of the way, she uncovered a small hand buried beneath a collapsed stone wall. She looked at the hand dispassionately, her heart hardened to the bodies that littered the city like confetti. Gesturing toward the other two, they moved the rest of the stone slab and pulled out the body of a young girl, her blond hair caked with dried blood. Penchant took the girl’s body in his clawed hands, his face always an emotionless mask, and tossed it into the truck alongside the rubble they had collected.
The trio had been quick to hide their weapons on the far side of town, in an abandoned department store, certain that being caught with them would be the same as a death sentence. The Terrans had been conducting thorough searches of the survivors. The haggard people were lined up outside randomly selected buildings where the Terrans had set up registration booths. As they entered, the survivors were photographed, their information added to a computer database, and then were unceremoniously stripped of their clothing. Each person was thoroughly searched for hidden weapons and explosives and underwent a genetic scan before their clothes were returned. All Lithids that had assumed a different form were identified, forced to assume their natural state, and tagged with a tracer bracelet.
Penchant turned back to the uneven rubble, scratching absently at his bracelet. He wanted nothing more than to pull it from his wrist, but they had already identified the explosives that were firmly attached to the perimeter of the thin metal band. Unsure of how potent the explosives would be, they had wisely decided to leave it well enough alone.
As a whistle blew over the installed loudspeakers located throughout the city, the trio collapsed heavily in the snow, caring very little about the cold that seeped into their skin. For two weeks, they had been laboring in the city, unable to escape. The Terrans had established a curfew and enforced it with deadly efficiency. The time they had chosen, time that would have been considered nighttime before, had been chosen arbitrarily. It was always nighttime in Miller’s Glen.
Keryn looked dejected as she collapsed in the snow next to the other two, ignoring the frigid cold that spread into her skin. Adam pulled out a nutrient bar, the staple of their new diet. Grimacing at the texture, he swallowed hard, forcing the rubbery food down his throat. The Terran guard nearby gave them an erstwhile glance before turning and pacing further up the street, the light on his helmet adding to the strong illumination from mounted spotlights which filled the ruins in which they worked. When he was far enough away, Keryn dropped the facade of being beyond exhaustion and the defiant look returned to her eyes.
Reaching into her thick winter jacket, Keryn pulled out a battered piece of paper. Unfurling it on a piece of stone rubble, her lithe, tan fingers traced the outline of a crudely sketched city. They had created the map over the past two weeks as they transferred through a myriad of work groups, clearing rubble from different parts of the city. Overall, they had mapped the major locations of the Terran occupation force.
“We need to get off this planet.” she said bluntly. “We can’t stay here. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of slowly but inevitably freezing to death.” The other two nodded in agreement. “We need a plan, something the Terrans won’t expect. Ideas?”
Adam reached over, pointing to a collection of hastily drawn buildings near the easily identifiable crater. “These are the barracks they established for the soldiers. They’re prefabricated structures, the type that burn easily if given the right incentive. We could take out most of their invading force with a couple well-placed explosives.”
Keryn shook her head. “No, no, that won’t work. We might be able to take out their entire occupation force in Miller’s Glen, but what’s to stop them from just glassing the planet from space after that? No, we need something that won’t result in the entire city being destroyed… again.”
“Then we get out of the city,” Penchant suggested. He pointed out a series of dotted lines that ran through all parts of the city. “We have mapped the majority of their patrol routes and could easily avoid them. We sneak out of the city one night after curfew and find another way off the planet.”
“We can avoid the patrols easily enough, but they’ve set up sensors all along the perimeter of the city,” Adam replied. “We trip one of those and we’ll be lucky if they just set off an alarm. More than likely, we’ll be triggering an
