Chapter Eleven
“Dead.” Mike regarded him flatly. This, again. “Alpha… ”
“No, you need to listen to me.” Alpha pulled away from him, and began to cycle restlessly around the room. He started to detach his armor while he walked, loosening the gauntlets and boots so that he could open up the whole suit and step out. “I’ve learned a lot of things, Mike, and I know they’re real. They tie into our orders.”
“How?” Mike didn’t move. His mouth was dry. Even the sight of Alpha in his bodysuit, the gunmetal mail swimming to cling to his long back, couldn’t help him shake the fear. “I’m not even sure you tried listening to me.”
“I swear that I listened. I judged everything I found against your advice.” Alpha shook his head. “But this has changed shit.”
“And I still really think Symon is doing his best to set us up. The men are beginning to feel it. They’re riled up. They know something’s wrong.” Mike started on getting his own armor off. It was harder without his corona on: he normally gave a BCI command, and the suit opened and let him step out. Manually, he had to trigger each section of armor to slide back into the chassis.
“You don’t even know why Symon’s helping us,” Alpha said.
That was true, and Mike was loathe to be caught out without evidence. He pulled his gauntlets off. “Fine. Why?”
“He woke up in his decanting tank.” Alpha sat down on the floor with a heavy sigh. “He was awake before he was meant to be properly alive, before they took him out to Recovery. He saw his brothers get dragged out by Controllers, and they did stuff to them, stuff with equipment in the lab. He saw them kill a few, right there. Just popped them right between the eyes before they even had a chance to wake up properly. They got shredded in the labs, and… he didn’t really tell me the rest. You can imagine.”
Mike didn’t remember much about the labs himself. Like most Nephilim, he’d first woken up in a warm hyperbaric pod in the Recovery Center, his corona jack already in place. He’d been naked, starving hungry and sore, innocent of everything else. He knew about the decanting tanks in the labs—every Nephilim saw them at least once during their early training—but had no memory of being in one.
“It starts from the minute you’re out. The Controllers pick off the ones they don’t want, and most of his brothers disappeared in the first three months. It was just four of them left out of fifteen Watchers. They told him that the ones who go missing go to Yetzirah, but after seeing them kill a whole bunch during first sorting, he doesn’t believe it. He was able to keep a lid on it better than Twofer ever could.”
“Right.” Mike scruffed his hair uncomfortably. Confirmation of Symon’s ability to be duplicitous was hardly reassuring. “So did Twofer wake up early as well?”
Alpha grimaced. “I don’t know for sure, but I bet he did. Makes sense, if you think back on it. What he was like.”
Twofer had never said anything about it. Mike was a little numb, head ringing at the image of men with his own face being decanted into the hands of Controllers, waiting like hungry gulls at the seashore to snatch and swallow them, the baby turtles crawling from the nest. He wasn’t sure what was worse: the idea of how close they’d come to death straight out of the tube, or that Twofer might have been awake early enough to see it. In retrospect, it made a kind of awful sense. Twofer had been everyone’s friend, but even Sev, his lover, had told Mike that even he sometimes felt he didn’t know him. He’d been a good soldier, funny, but always slightly irreverent. Sometimes his humor was on the edge, and sometimes, the laughter he’d induced was nervous, uneasy.
“It’s possible. But why didn’t he ever tell us?” Mike asked, quietly.
“Probably because of shit like this.” Alpha waved a hand around. “You said it yourself. It’s taken the wind out of the whole squad.”
“So… what did you work out? What was he looking at?” Mike asked. “You said it has something to do with our orders?”
For several long seconds, Alpha didn’t say a word. “There’s an old arco out near Mount Victoria, on the All-Pac side of the line. Twofer found out that the All-Pac is decanting women there. Women. Nephilim women.”
Women. The word bounced around the inside of Mike’s head. He could almost hear it rattle. Women. His mouth opened, and then closed.
“But they… they… they can’t do that. That’s… everyone knows…”
“Well the Dragon’s fucking figured it out.” Alpha laid a broad hand on Mike’s back. “And Twofer knew. He found out about it the night before he disappeared. I followed his footsteps and found the same info. The shield delivery is just a cover. They’re sending us in to wipe the place, Mike, and they didn’t tell me what was inside.”
“Well… how would they know? How does anyone know about that?” Mike couldn’t believe it. He was fairly certain he was incapable of believing it. The litany against falsehood was cycling in his brain, around and around, like Alpha’s pacing. Six things doth the LORD hate.
“How would Twofer have learned that? And if you say it was via Symon, I’m going to punch you in the face and you’re going to have to let me.”
“It wasn’t Symon. He showed me the back door, but I found my own way. Give me some credit.” Alpha looked over at him. “I think… I’m not sure, but we have spies who live to learn this stuff. And… from what I read, I think that there might even be Nephilim who live on Earth outside the army.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever met one,” Mike said. He watched Alpha, tense. He was sliding back from himself without meaning to, as his hindbrain rattled off verses and commandments and imperatives, one after the other. None of them were stronger than his morbid fascination. “The whole idea… I mean, what would you eat? What if your swarm gave out?”
“Look, I know. I get it. I just had to tell you. There’s women, and… we have to take out the place, or one of the places, where the All-Pac is decanting them.”
Mike leaned in, elbows on his knees. Intensity well up from deep inside, hammering behind his eyes. “Are we going to follow through? Or is that what this is about?”
Alpha looked down at him. The lanterns threw his face into craggy relief. “Are you joking? Of course we’re following through. I wouldn’t disobey the Lord. Asking questions, looking shit up… that’s one thing. Disobeying orders? Fuck, Mike. Never. We were put on this bitch of a planet to do a job. I just wanted to know the truth.”
“But… you thought about it?” Mike said.
“Yeah.” Alpha said. His eyes hooded, lids half-closing. “I thought about it.”
Mike had ever only seen one woman in the flesh, an enemy soldier, a human. The Dragon still fielded their lesser humans in their larger machines. When he’d cracked her cockpit during mop-up, he’d been shocked to kick back the hatch and see a vacant, bloodied, delicately boned face staring through him. He hadn’t known what she was, at first, until he’d gone on the Net and figured it out. As a Medic, he knew OF women… but they were never seen on base. They were confined to Evehalls at birth, as far from the Nephilim as the Host could get them. “The hell they think they’re doing?”
“I don’t know.” Alpha returned to him, and crouched down. “So, look, I’m sorry I backed you into a corner, Mike. I don’t regret digging, but I don’t know if I even trust half this stuff myself. All I know is that I can’t just believe anything I’m told any more.”
He never apologized like that to anyone else, and it broke Mike’s heart, just a little bit. He was at once hungrily, clumsily, shamefully and agonizingly in love with this man. His contrite tone, his sudden submission washed away the rage like a bad memory. “It’s alright. But we can’t tell the squad. They’ll fall to pieces, starting with Sixie and Sev.”
Alpha nodded, and reached for him. He rasped his thumbs over his cheeks. “I know. Trust me. Maybe one day… if I can ever prove it. Maybe we’ll talk about it then.”
He hoped he wouldn’t be able to. They’d have a better idea tomorrow, if they picked female corpses out of the rubble. Mike smiled, but it was strained. “And I won’t tell the Knight Captain. We can sort this out ourselves.”
Alpha lifted Mike’s hand, and pressed his mouth to his knuckles. He lingered there, eyes closed, and then sighed. “You know, there’s been two hundred twenty-five Samuel units before us. Two hundred and twenty-five Alphas with our name. I wonder what they’d say to me about this.”
“They’d say you’re a good man, and a damn fine soldier, and that no one deserves to break out of this joint more than you do.” Mike smiled and shifted back along the bed. It was nothing except a thin foam roll, side by side with Alpha’s. He held out his other hand towards him.
“And probably that you should worry less about shit you can’t control, and more about what you can.”
Alpha chuckled, and caught the offered hand. He moved over him, slowly, and caught the other. Mike couldn’t breathe properly, but not for lack of air, as Alpha pinned both his wrists to the ground and leaned in close. “I’ll take that as a hint.”
Mike laughed, and on impulse, offered the side of his neck. Alpha made a sound of approval as he closed in and bit, gently at first, and then harder. He knew they shouldn’t be doing this, fucking without their coronae on, but some latent part of Mike had always wanted to do it without someone watching over their shoulder, or listening to them from another the room. No inspection, no boot-washing, no Grace. Out here, where there was nothing but the sky above and the shuddering hot earth below, the sweet pain of Alpha’s teeth and the pressing dark, giving in to his lover’s greed for him was the easiest sin in the world.
