“The day’s not over yet,” he told her, and heard her chuckle as they headed back toward the stairs.
He didn’t have any capacity for humor, though. The day really wasn’t over, and he was no closer to finding Fee.
He made a list in his head.
Free the hostages. Get rid of the Garmman battleship. Find and rescue the love of his life.
No problem.
CHAPTER 32
“The jammer is down.”Caran stretched in his seat. “Full comms have resumed. Only, Opir said they’d give us ten more minutes.”
“Maybe they couldn’t,” Bart said. “They were in Grih headquarters. It was only a matter of time before someone came to check on what was going on.”
“As long as they got away with the jammer, I’m fine with ten minutes less,” Vira said. “We need that jammer for the build.”
“Depending on the wait time off the way station, we should be hearing from them in about an hour,” Caran said. “They’ll load up and follow us.”
Although no one mentioned where they were going, Fee thought it was a good guess that the runner was headed for wherever the Class 5 was being built—duplicate architectural trophy in hand. Looking out of the ship’s front screen, Fee was getting a sinking feeling as to where that might be.
Kyber’s Arm swirled and raged on the planet below.
The perpetual sand storm was bending to the left, looking top heavy and as if it were about to topple over.
The runner passed over it and then began to angle down toward the desert.
Fiona leaned back in her chair. “The old Tecran base? I thought that had been blown up.”
She’d actually been there when it had been destroyed, although practically speaking she had been far enough away to see the pyrotechnics of it, to hear the boom and feel the ground shake beneath her feet, but she’d never gone back to view the devastation.
She had been told it was a crater in the sand.
Obviously not.
“What do you know about the Tecran base?” Vira asked.
Fee studied her. She hadn’t spoken about her time at the base with anyone other than Grih Battle Center, and she realized it was possible these people didn’t know she’d infiltrated the base with Hal, been held prisoner there, and then escaped, a year before.
“Only what I’ve heard from the Grih,” she said. “But I know it was near Kyber’s Arm, and we’ve just gone over the storm and are now coming down to land. It’s a logical conclusion.”
Vira hesitated, then shrugged. “The base was badly damaged, but the two lower levels were salvageable, and the central atrium was the perfect place to build the Class 5.” Vira’s comms unit buzzed at her, and she turned away and spoke softly, giving coordinates and what sounded like a password.
Fee shifted in her chair, trying to get comfortable, and thought about the place Vira called the atrium. It had been a type of amphitheater two or three floors down inside the base, a place for the troops to watch strange alien creatures fight each other to the death. She wondered if Vira knew its original purpose.
She had never felt such rage as the day she’d seen what they were doing there, and she had been happy for Eazi to burn it all down.
It looked like it had been better built than they realized.
“I thought the Balcoan government was going to dismantle the base and share any useful information they found with the Grih?” she said.
“That’s what was agreed,” Bart said, and there was a smirk in his voice. “The Balcoan government outsourced it to private contractors.”
“The Grih came in first, worked out the comms center was a smoking ruin, and then left,” Vira said, and she sounded bitter about it. “Once they knew there was no data to be taken, they tossed it back to the Balcoans.”
“At the Balcoans’ insistence,” Fee said. “Or did I get that wrong?”
There was a pause. “No. We did demand that we be the ones to work through what was left,” Vira said at last. “But the Grih only agreed to that because they thought all the useful information had been destroyed.”
