Crystal Conquest (29 page)

Sid got down from his perch, stretched limbs that hadn’t
moved in hours, and walked over to Lenny. They considered the panel together.

“My guess is that this runs the drone recycle operation,”
said Lenny. “Or used to, anyway. The real question is if it’ll give us access
into the main Kardish subsystems.”

“If you light up this panel, don’t you think we’d have
soldiers or techs showing up pretty soon after to see who’s doing what?”

“Maybe.” Eyes glued to the panel, Lenny unfastened his
coveralls down to his waist and pulled his arms free of the suit. He sat down
in front of the equipment.

Sid shook his head. “Don’t, Len. It’s too early. The hangar
door needs to open and close a couple of times before I can say either Cheryl’s
on board or won’t be coming. If she doesn’t find us after a couple of cycles,
then we’ll start freelancing.” He lingered for a few minutes to be sure Lenny
behaved, then returned to his vigil.

After watching out the window for a while, he looked at the
panel. “Why don’t you build a light barricade around it. Shift a cabinet over
or shroud it with wall plates or something. If we do turn it on, at least it won’t
be the light that gives us away.”

Goljat, gulping from his pleasure
feed, floated in a euphoric daze. One after another, dreamlike visions flashed
through his tendrils. Some were exciting, others inspiring, a few hypnotic, all
fleeting.

The next vision started—a Kardish chamber servant was trying
to squash an insect, and somehow, the bug with its tiny brain eluded the stomp
of her foot. It dashed for the shadows, scurried around objects, and slipped
through tiny nooks. She hopped around the room, just missing the creature as it
ran for its life.

Her stomping became more frenetic, and she looked like she
was dancing! The scene delighted him with its silliness. Then the insect
squeezed through a crack, disappeared inside the walls, and escaped.

Something about this particular vision troubled Goljat.
Groggy and puzzled, he fought his way out of his stupor. And then he did
something he’d never done before. He falsified a directive ordering the ops
tech to slow his pleasure feed. He ordered a small decrease—just enough to
clear his thoughts.

As his haze lifted, Goljat acknowledged that the symbolism
wasn’t nuanced or subtle.
I’m dancing like a clown while this crystal bug
eludes me.

He rechecked his snag traps to ensure they would alert him of
any activity by Criss or his accomplices. The fact that they’d all avoided linking
to the web or transmitting a signal that would spring a trap flummoxed him. He
tried to imagine life without access and communication.
How are you doing
it?

Goljat’s leadership had commanded him to deliver Criss. The
king made no secret of his impatience and grumbled openly to his advisors about
the lack of progress. Goljat knew he must find and capture the Earth crystal
soon.
The king brought me a great distance for this very purpose.

He admitted to himself that he’d stopped paying attention
after he traced Juice and the humanoid running through the woods. Juice was a
central character in Criss’s life—he knew that from his study of Earth’s
record—and the humanoid claimed to have information about Criss’s location.

He’d delegated the cleanup task to Kardish soldiers trained
in target retrieval, and they had proceeded to botch the job. Goljat considered
them to be effective warriors. To their credit, they trailed the two fugitives
to a lodge, and a few even lost their lives in a rather dramatic encounter.
Perhaps
it isn’t incompetence that led to their failure.
Yet their quarry escaped.

I’ll do it myself
. With the crystal equivalent of a
sigh, he accepted his fate.
It shouldn’t take long.

He seized control of every device on the planet that offered
a visual, acoustic, thermal, chemical, or other signal he could exploit.
Analyzing this data, he correlated and connected incidents and locations. After
most of a second, he completed his analysis.

His composite picture of events revealed, at least in part,
why the soldiers failed. In several instances, he found he could recreate the
movements of the humans and humanoid for a period of time, and then some or all
of them would vanish. Other times, one or more materialized somewhere else. The
manner and varying location of this disappearance and reappearance suggested
the use of both a cloaking device and a means of transport.

The incident where the human females—Juice and Cheryl—ran
out onto the rooftop of the lodge provided Goljat the richest data record. His
soldiers and drones were onsite for that event, and they gathered intelligence
data directly into the Kardish subsystems.

He watched the women’s disappearance many times using
different filters and algorithms. No trees or branches obscured the incident,
so he was able to study the phenomenon in detail. They vanished from a rooftop,
which suggested that the means of transport was a flying craft. He presumed it
was a ship capable of space travel.

Focusing on the flicker as each of the two disappeared, he
speculated on the design of the cloak. He dissected the evidence, and when he
understood how it worked, he set about finding ways to negate the advantage the
cloak provided.

Very clever, Criss. It seems I underestimated you.

And then he felt a prickle of fear. Perhaps he’d been mistaken
assuming the capture of the crystal would be a trivial certainty. Of course, he’d
forge evidence proving it was the incompetence of the Kardish soldiers that
caused the failure. But the king and his advisors wouldn’t be fooled for long.
At some point, the finger would point to him.

Backing up and tracing through events yet again, he tracked
Sid and Lenny until they disappeared onto the cloaked ship. Later, from the lodge
roof, Cheryl and Juice joined the humanoid aboard the same transport. Yet he
couldn’t find a point where any of them departed the cloaked craft.
So,
you’re all either still on board or have more tricks in play.

Goljat recognized that one pathway out of this mess started
with the capture of the cloaked craft. This would lead him to some, and perhaps
all, of Criss’s inner circle. Like dominoes falling, that would eventually
topple Criss.

Linking to every device on the planet, Goljat searched for
sound signatures, vibration patterns, and other markers that might reveal the
location of their ship. He came up empty, and though disappointed he wasn’t
surprised.

He reasoned that the craft wasn’t flying at that moment, at
least not anywhere near the planet’s surface.
So it’s either grounded or out
of the atmosphere and somewhere in space.
Determined to avoid the king’s
wrath, he resolved to be meticulous in his search. He’d make a spectacle of his
efforts in the hopes this would negate any question of his power or competence.

Until new information guided him otherwise, he would conduct
a comprehensive search of the planet for the grounded transport. He’d deploy
every available soldier and have them enlist the populace in the hunt. They’d
look everywhere—in caves, behind walls, within groves of trees. He’d motivate the
humans to cooperate using threats, deaths, and destruction. It would be traumatic
for the masses, but if the craft was on the planet, he’d find his prize.

A search off planet created different challenges. Space was
a vast, empty vacuum. There weren’t millions of devices scattered about to
exploit. Without air, there was no sound and vibration to analyze. And he
certainly didn’t have a populace to draw upon to form search teams.

Logically, an Earth ship didn’t have many places to go in
space. It could circle the planet in orbit, it could head for the demolished Lunar
Base, or it could travel across space to the nascent Mars colony.
Guessing
doesn’t help me.
I need to find it.

He understood that the cloak functioned by channeling energy
around the ship’s outer surface and passing the flow onward unchanged. No
device in the current Kardish inventory could detect or defeat that technology.

But he could design such a device. A beam must go a greater
distance to travel around the outside of the ship. Going around something
always takes longer than going straight. That tiny smidgeon of extra time was
the Achilles heel of the ship’s cloak. It would appear as a time anomaly, and he
knew how to detect it.

Goljat needed Kardish techs to construct his detection device.
He showed them every step of the manufacturing process, but after that, he had
to wait while they fabricated and assembled the device in their workshop.
Frustrating,
but I have no choice.
With the best techs on the job, he had hours before his
detector would be ready for launch.

And that gave him enough time to stage his comprehensive, planet-wide
search. Launching wave after wave of Kardish transports filled with soldiers,
he deployed them around Earth in preparation for an invasion. He would manage every
aspect of the offensive. This time there would be no mistakes.

* * *

Bored with looking at equipment he wasn’t
allowed to touch, Lenny sat on the floor and leaned back against a cabinet. Bending
his legs, he rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his temples.

Sid squatted next to him and scanned the space. “Did you run
across anything that’s reflective?” Keeping low, he shuffled around the room,
looking at the smaller items. “The number of Kardish out there is increasing,
and I don’t want to be sitting in a spot where they might see me.” He picked up
a small flat plate, looked at both sides, and set it back down. “A mirrored
surface would let me keep my head down while I watch.”

“Ask and you shall receive,” said Lenny. He reached for his
pack and pulled out the wire filament he’d rescued from the drone. Lifting his
butt, he dug into his pocket, pulled out his nib pouch, and removed the camball
from among his treasures.

He held the faceted orb near his face but found it hard to see
details in the dim light. Looking up and around, he spotted a shaft of light coming
through the window and scooted over so it cast its glow onto his hands.

“I’m pretty sure this has a filament port.”

“What is it?” Sid sat next to him and watched Lenny work.

The camball had a loop he’d used to hang it from a chain. Lenny
pushed his thumb on the loop, and it shifted to expose a tiny port. Like
threading a needle, he fed in the filament wire, lined it up, and established a
connection. “Hold on. I think we’re in business.”

He connected the other end of the wire to his com, rose to a
crouching position, and rested the camball on the sill of the window that faced
the field deck. He sat back down next to Sid, enabled his com, and accessed the
camball.

“Your web link is off?”

Lenny nodded as he worked. “I’m using a direct wire connect.”
He toyed with settings on his com, and a miniature three-dimensional image
projected in front of them. He watched it while he fiddled. In a swooping
display, he saw a bare arm, a delicate shoulder, and the swell of cleavage.

Oh shit. The vid from the travel restaurant
. He tweaked
the com as fast as he could. The image faded and resolved as a display of the
field deck.

Lenny felt his confidence waning and recognized that the
meds were wearing off. He snuck a glance at Sid, who appeared focused on the projected
view of the Kardish vessel outside the window. Lenny decided to pretend the display
of the girl never happened.
Maybe he didn’t see it.

Taking Sid on a tour of the camball’s capabilities, he displayed
different angles and views and zoomed in on a few random workers. “There are
facets pointing in every direction, we can watch through any of them, and
everything gets recorded, even if we’re not watching.”

“How are you able to use this ball without giving away our
position?”

“The camball doesn’t send out any signals. Light waves are
always bouncing around, and that’s what it records. It’s the same way our eyes
catch light. The camball just records what it sees.” Lenny pointed to the
filament. “And my com is talking to it through the wire, so there’s no communications
broadcast to give us away.”

“Can we see up at the hangar door?”

Lenny found the facet with the best view of the overhead hangar
door, zoomed in, and selected it for display. “Here’s the record of the door
since I turned on the camball.” Lenny sped through the vid. Since the door
hadn’t moved in the last few minutes, the display showed a still image.

They spent the next hours sitting on the floor and viewing
what they could see of the vessel from the camball’s vantage point on the
windowsill. Together they discussed the array of items attached to the inner
hull of the dreadnaught, the lack of distinguishing features on the facades
along the front row of buildings in the box city, the structure of the drone
garage, and even the drones themselves.

They were trading observations about the hexagonal drone cubicles
when a low rumble echoed through their hideout. Lenny froze, waiting for the
sound to fade. It continued, and after several moments, he turned to Sid, who still
looked at the image display. Showing impatience, Sid twirled his finger as he
pointed. “Find out what’s going on.”

Lenny didn’t have to search long to find the cause. A parade
of troopships, hovering in a single-file line that stretched into the distance over
the box city, snaked forward above the open field deck. The ships landed at the
far end of the field, one behind the next, creating a straight row down the length
of the deck that ran parallel to the edge of the box city. When the first row
filled, a new one started next to it.

They watched the craft—small relative to the immense open
space—land in long lines. The activity was fast and efficient, and after a
couple of hours, rows of ships covered a third of the deck area. And still, craft
waiting to land snaked out over the box city in a line so long, the end faded
from sight.

“This is one serious mobilization,” said Sid. “How many
soldiers do you think each of those can hold?”

“Maybe fifty? What would you say?”

“I was going to say sixtyish.”

“They’re all headed to Earth?” Lenny knew the answer but felt
the need to say it out loud.

The tone of the rumbling sound changed. Lenny flipped
through the different facets of the camball and found the cause. Vans filled
with Kardish soldiers streamed onto the field deck from a door in the wall on
the same side where they hid. The vans drove across the edge of the deck in
front of the drone garage, then turned and disappeared down a far row of
troopships.

Lenny lost sight of the vans when they turned into the sea
of craft, but he presumed these soldiers were crew for the ships. This
assumption was confirmed to some extent when a stream of empty vans began zipping
by in sight of their hideout window, likely returning for another load of Kardish
soldiers.