Thirds would not tell her what happened in the dome. He wouldn’t talk to her at all. The only way he would speak to her was if she allowed him to return, the triumphant warrior, to his home.
So they had a stalemate.
Hours after the battle outside the outpost, if anyone could call that a battle, Washington called her into one of the conference rooms. There, on the table, he had visuals of what was happening on the moon below.
The dome glowed from within.
“What is that?” she asked him.
“Laser rifle fire,” he said. “I think they’re killing each other.”
She wanted to order him to go in, but both of them knew they couldn’t. They had no idea how many people were there, or what kind of weapons they had.
With the help of Okani, she contacted the Eaufasse ambassador.
“They’re killing each other inside the dome,” she said. “Can you stop them?”
“They are yours,” the ambassador said. “We can do nothing.”
As they spoke, the dome’s glow increased.
“We have to do something,” she said.
“You must,” the ambassador said. “We leave it to you.”
Then it severed the connection.
She watched as the glowing dome grew brighter. “That’s a fire,” she said to Washington.
“Or worse,” he said.
They’d seen images of this before. Domes were vulnerable to internal attack.
The dome had turned bright red.
Washington looked away. He knew, as she did, what was happening inside. The people in there were actually cooking. Burning up. Disintegrating.
She didn’t have the equipment to stop this.
She couldn’t turn away. She watched as the dome grew brighter and brighter, until it blew.
She couldn’t hear it, but she knew on Epriccom, it must have sounded like a million bombs went off. The ground would shake; there would be other damage throughout the various settlements.
If the Eaufasse blamed her, she would use that contact she made with the ambassador as proof that she had done all she could.
“Why would they do that?” Washington asked.
The air was black with smoke. Bits of the dome flew like shards into the trees. She shut off the hologram. She couldn’t look any more.
“They knew we were here,” she said.
“So?” he asked. “We’d been here for days. Why now?”
She stared at the empty tabletop. Then shook her head. “The experiment failed. They lost all sixteen boys.”
“I still don’t understand.”
She raised her gaze to his. “Success or failure,” she said, “what do you do at the end of an experiment?”
“I’m not a scientist,” he snapped.
“You disassemble it. You take it apart. You make your notes and you start over.”
“No one left,” he said. “No one made notes. No one survived.”
“No one survived in the dome,” she said. “But you don’t know if they sent their results elsewhere. You don’t know what kind of recordings they made.”
“We’ve been monitoring communications,” he said. “We would know.”
“Would we?” she asked. “We didn’t even know those things were weapons. We thought they were plants.”
He stared at her, his skin gray and bloodless. “How have you done this for so long?” he asked.
She gave him a small smile. “You have to realize when you’ve done your job.”
“Huh?” he asked.
“Our mission was to remove the enclave,” she said. “We did that, and found out something along the way. And we’ve managed to keep a good relationship with the Eaufasse. All in all, we’ve done well.”
“We just watched hundreds of people die,” he said.
“Did we?” she asked. “For all we know, there had been no one but sixteen clones in that enclave.”
He shook his head. “You don’t believe that,” he said, and let himself out of the room.
He was right; she didn’t believe that there had been only sixteen clones in that enclave. She did believe that her team had done their job.
She also believed that they had stumbled on something big, something the diplomats and the Military Guard would have to deal with, something she no longer had to concern herself with.
She was glad of that. The boy, Thirds, unnerved her. And the other five probably would as well.
She ran a hand along the tabletop. One mission done. She would go talk to the assistants next, make sure they were again focused on possible future missions.
She didn’t want to think about this one any more.
She had a hunch no one else did either.
Acknowledgements
This project wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the Kickstarter support from these wonderful people:
Gerard M. Ackerman
JC Andrijeski
Donald J. Bingle
Kirsten Brodbeck-Kenney
AnneMarie Buhl
T. Thorn Coyle
Gary Dockter
Eric Edstrom
Lynda Foley
Karen Fonville
Robbyn Foster
Mark-Wayne Harris
Malachi Kenney
Pierre L'Allier
Rich Laux
Stephen Lebans
Christel Adina Loar
John Lorentz
Michael Lucas
Big Ed Magusson
Lisa M. May
Robert J. McCarter
Sean Monaghan
Carole Nelson Douglas
Alexei Pawlowski
Jeanette Sanders
Risa Scranton
Janna Silverstein
Bob Sojka
Margaret St. John
Robert E. Stutts
Raphael Sutton
Scott Tefoe
Edd Vick
Terry Weyna
Stephanie Writt
Thank you!
About the Editor
USA Today
bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith published more than a hundred novels in thirty years and hundreds and hundreds of short stories across many genres.
He wrote a couple dozen
Star Trek
novels, the only two original
Men in Black
novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries
The Tenth Kingdom
and other books for
Hallmark Hall of Fam
e movies.
He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of a dozen films, from
The Final Fantasy
to
Steel
to
Rundown.
He now writes his own original fiction under just the one name, Dean Wesley Smith. In addition to his upcoming novel releases, his monthly magazine called
Smith’s Monthly
premiered October 1, 2013, filled entirely with his original novels and stories.
Dean also worked as an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He now plays a role as an executive editor for the original anthology series Fiction River.
For more information go to www.deanwesleysmith.com, www.smithsmonthly.com or www.fictionriver.com.
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