Oh, guys! Gehenna sent them both, you need to see this!
Abruptly there was a feed showing on their HUDs that showed them the Hive. Both of them watched as, in silence, the Hive disintegrated and the small pieces of it broke apart and dispersed into a glittering sea of destruction.
“We destroyed a Hive,” Khoth breathed.
“Yeah,” Jace said as he watched as the Hive, the Khul, and the humans inside of it had all been turned into space dust. “Let’s get home, shall we?”
Khoth swung his head towards Jace and asked, “My home or yours?”
Jace sighed. He’d seen the enemy. He understood what they were facing. He couldn’t forget the horror of what he had seen. The Khul had to be destroyed. “Mine first.”
What's Right
“Where is Jace?” Colonel Diane Parker asked. “Has anyone seen him? He was just here! Khoth, he was with you, wasn’t he? Inside the ship?”
The last of the Khul ships was blasting off from Earth. They were headed towards the Sun. The humans inside them had been given quick–and as benevolent–deaths as could be given. Jace had insisted on being part of every single one of those deaths. Khoth had been by his side, trying to give strength to his Xi and Xa simply by being there as words were inadequate to address the horror and pain and loss.
But now as Khoth turned his face from the blue-white glow of the Khul engines, he realized that Diane was right. Jace was not there. This last ship to go was the one they had flown in and there had been no humans to put out of their suffering inside. That had already occurred with the destruction of the Hive.
“I do not see Gehenna either.” Khoth frowned as he used his suit to search for both Jace and the AI.
“We just got him back and he wouldn’t explain…” Diane bit down on the frantic fear in her voice. Her nostrils flared as she drew in deep breaths to steady herself. “He asked us not to question him about what happened up there. Not yet. That he needed to get this done…” She gestured towards the last ship whose exhaust looked as large as another star in the desert sky now. “And then he would tell us.”
It was on the return trip to Earth that Jace had explained to Khoth this plan.
“Everyone will want to talk to me. Debrief us, I guess, about what happened and what we think it means and all that,” Jace had told him as he had paced around the interior of the pod chamber of the Khul ship.
The pods were empty now though there were still living larvae in the ship’s systems. The skin between Khoth’s shoulder blades twitched at that thought and he found himself looking carefully at the piping, seeing if there were any leaks.
“The thing is that we can’t really take time for all that right now. Gehenna tells me that there are a dozen Khul vessels in and around Sunrise, all of them with cargo. We have to stop the suffering of those people and we’ve got to get these ships with the larvae off Earth,” Jace continued and Khoth looked back at the lithe, yet muscular form that moved with grace yet tensity in that moment.
He couldn’t help but also remember how Jace had risked his life for Khoth’s, had come back for him despite such an act being almost certain death, and then had put together an insane plan that had worked to get them out of the Hive. He’d respected the young man before that, but now he had to admit that Jace was rising in his estimation to almost Daesah levels. He tried to push down that admiration, reminding himself that Jace was very new to all of this, and yet he was the Pilot for a reason.
“A debriefing in General Intoshkin’s hands would take considerable sub-cycles,” Khoth agreed with Jace.
“So I vote we don’t go back to the base, we don’t go back to the Osiris, not yet. Have them come to us,” Jace said as he paused in his frantic pacing. “We don’t ask permission to deal with the ships. We just do it. That will keep them off kilter.”
“I agree. That seems like a wise course,” Khoth answered.
Jace looked up into Khoth’s face. “No one can truly understand what it was like there, but us, Khoth.”
Khoth’s voice softened, “No, they cannot.”
“Everyone is just trying to wrap their heads around me, the Osiris, Gehenna,” Jace told him. “They’ll want to think and regroup. They’ll want to have things ordered before they do anything.”
“Yes.” Khoth inclined his head.
Jace’s eyes became unfocused for a moment. He was clearly speaking more for himself than for Khoth right then. And Khoth didn’t think he was actually referring to those on the ground as Jace said, “The impact of what we saw and did will get in the way of what we have to do right now to help people.”
They had not had a chance to speak more as Gehenna merrily texted them that they were about to land! But no more needed to be said. They were in agreement that speaking of what had occurred in the Hive, to those like Mrs. Lo, would not be discussed until they had dealt with the other Khul vessels, and made Earth safe for the moment.
Part of what Khoth had not had a chance to say to Jace was that his mother and a Thaf’ell fleet might well be through the gate by the time they had completed that task. She would not allow General Intoshkin or the Parkers to keep Jace from the Illumen Alliance’s grasp.
His eyes scanned the sky for any sign of his mother’s Colossus-class spaceship, the Ashaton, but saw no sign of it yet. So his gaze swung towards Colonel Parker who was watching him very closely. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides and her whole posture was rigid. She didn’t trust him. She thought he had something to do with Jace disappearing.
Not yet.
“Yes, I heard him say this to you and agreed with it,” Khoth told her.
