of discovering a hidden weapons cache somewhere. It was a more difficult task than he might have gussed.
Kai had a frustrated look on his face. He was restless, but he held his tongue.
“I bet you’re wondering what we’re doing here,” Jack said.
“The question crossed my mind.”
“Trying to figure out if you’re telling the truth about… well, anything. Seems you are.”
“The world is full of surprises, no?”
Jack smiled in spite of himself. “Now, there’s good news and bad news in this slag pile. The good news is that the resistance saw the attack coming, and evacuated before you all got here.”
“How can you tell?”
“Trucks, planes. This place was rotten with ‘em, but there’s no sign of any here. The only explanation is that they got the hell out of dodge before the fireworks started.”
“Where’d they get the information”
“Ancient Chinese secret. I’ll never tell.”
“Fair answer. And the bad news?”
“Since they had time to pack up and leave, I’m betting they took most of their supplies with ‘em. I was hoping to pick up a little extra firepower, but there’s nothing but rubbish here.”
Kai looked at him like he was absolutely mad. “Maybe I wasn’t clear, Jack. There’s a legion marching toward the Ark right now. Armor, siege weapons and more than a million ground troops. We can’t fight them on our own.”
“I know,” Jack said, “but I like to keep my options open. You can solve a lot of problems with a honking big pile of explosives.”
Looking at the remains of Al Saif didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. It looked like a hurricane had hit the base. An angry hurricane that was on fire, and full of lawnmower blades.
Off on the other side of the ruins, the rhino waved and shouted something. His deep voice carried a surprising distance over open ground. Kai cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted something back in a language Jack was beginning to recognize if not understand.
“What’d he say?”
“He asked if you were done moping around yet.”
“And?”
“I told him you’d be done soon. Don’t make a liar of me, Jack.”
He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be angry at that. “We’ll hit the road in a bit. Riddle me this though, Mr. Space Ninja… what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“If I knew that, I’d have done it already. Don’t worry. You’re a resourceful guy. You’ll think of something.”
Jack shook his head. “You either have too much faith, or a really strange sense of humor.”
The alien picked up a piece of ruined metal and spun it around in his hand, trying to determine its original purpose. After a moment of fruitless head scratching, he cocked his arm back and threw it far into the distance.
It occurred to Jack that the hunk of metal must have weighed more than twenty kilos, yet Kai handled it like a baseball.
“They could have at least left me a bottle of hooch,” Jack said after a while.
“Hooch?”
“Booze. Alcohol. Fermentation of fruit or grain, ingested to produce intoxication.”
“You had me at alcohol.”
“Ah.”
Jack took one last look at the wreckage all around, shook his head and said, “That’s enough. Let’s get out of here.” Then he turned and started off toward the flyer.
Kai followed. “Where to?”
“I want to see this alien legion. You know where they’ll be?”
“Give or take. About two days ride at our current rate.”
“Would they pay any attention to one of their own flyers buzzing them?”
“Probably not, as long as you don’t act too suspicious.”
“Good. I’m gonna prep the flyer. Go get the others.”
“Will do,” Kai said, and then he got a funny look on his face. “By the way… ummm… what’s a ninja?”
Jack laughed. “They were assassins who excelled at sneaking into enemy castles and eliminating targets unseen. The movies got carried away, and portrayed them as unstoppable killing machines with mystical abilities. It’s kind of silly.”
“I learn something new every day,” Kai said with a smile. Then he turned and ran off at a speed that’d make an Italian sports car blush. It took Jack the entire walk back to the flyer to convince himself what he saw was real, and not just some fanciful hallucination.
Chapter 45:
Millipede
Jack and his four alien companions traveled north, from the dusty beige of the Mideast to the green hills and roiling mountains of Eastern Turkey. Jack had never seen the Turkish landscape before, and the mountains there spiked out of the ground defiantly as if the Earth itself were invading the sky. The intensity of the steep mountains and gorges took his breath away, and he badly wanted to stop and explore.
There wasn’t any time for that, though, and they flew on. Turkey gave way to green Georgia, followed by the Caucasus Mountains, a line of snow capped peaks which stood in a row like jagged teeth. On the other side, they found themselves in the remains of Russia, whose abandoned farmland stretched out in all directions like a patchwork quilt, so large that Jack thought he’d never see the end of it.
The colder climate and high altitudes slowed their progress, but they finally caught up with the Oikeyan legion after nearly three days of travel. The legion wasn’t difficult to find, like a insanely large herd of buffalo lumbering across the land, stretching more than fifty kilometers from beginning to end. It was populated by strange creatures, some as large as container ships, and attended by swarms of flyers darting from one part of the pack to the next, like flocks of birds before a storm. The multitude of stomping feet kicked up a dust cloud that billowed out toward the horizon and covered the ground in a dense and impenetrable haze.
Jack, joined to the flyer he named Felix, approached the herd cautiously from behind, nipping at their heels. “Holy crap,” his disembodied voice said once he was close enough to really appreciate the scale of it.
A rumble filled the air like endless thunder.
“You see,” Kai said, “we can’t fight this. Even the Nefrem would have trouble standing before this kind of force.”
Jack and Felix surged forward, weaving into and through the formation. He flew up alongside one of the great grey walkers, and marveled at the locomotive-sized cannon mounted atop it. He imagined a weapon that big could crack a mountain in two.
“We could talk to them, maybe convince them to stop.”
“Come on, Jack… do they look like they’re in a talking mood?” Kai shouted over the roar.
“There’s gotta be someone in charge who could put a stop to this. Some leadership.”
“There is,” Kai said, “The ones you call pilots are in control. The Alarhya. But they won’t listen to anyone anymore.”
“What changed?”
“Your tactics. Your kind left Yuon Kwon mangled and broken in the field, and that infuriated the Alarhya. They consider the vehicles sacred. When the suicide bombings began, it was the final straw.”
“Suicide bombings! What suicide bombings?”
“It started after your capture. Generators were too difficult to reach, so the terrorists went after population centers. Markets, parks and the like. I don’t blame your people, but you see how these things escalate?”
