Ancalagon - 121. Chapter 121

“Don’t kill me, don’t kill me! I-I can help you. Mereval, I know where she is. She commed us the orders, so I put a tracker on her signal, just in case.”

Garjah’s smile was a thing of sadistic beauty. “I didn’t train you, but at least you aren’t that stupid. Where’s the tracker?”

“P-pocket.”

“Essell?” Garjah wanted me to get it? Oh, orderer of the beast and all that. Stars! It was that, or he’d been able to smell that the man really had soiled himself because I was not happy I had to dig around in his pants to find the tracker device, which turned out to be a slim stylus in one upper thigh pocket.

“Won’t she assume her comm was tracked and get a new one?”

“I told you, they’re out of people and places to hide. We’ll use this to find them in no time.” Garjah turned and went back into the shed. I followed him and Bouncer followed me, leaving the rest of the officers to deal with our would-be attackers.

“Are you going to tell me what the rest of the plan is now?” I leaned against the back of his chair, watching Garjah plug the device into one of the ports on his comms. The screens lit up, one of them whirring while the other began beeping. “What’s that doing?”

He was busy tapping at some of the buttons on the consoles, but pointed to the one whirring or making the funny swish noise. “This one is masking our signal trace.” He pointed to the other one with his right hand. “This one is doing the active trace.”

“Just in case she has some sort of warning system?” I asked.

Garjah nodded. “Exactly. That idiot probably would have alerted her the second he tried to backtrace her signal, but I have sophisticated equipment that will mask my signal trace and also let us find her… aha, her exact location!” Garjah tapped two lit up squares on the console in front of him and a glowing indicator showed up on the screen that had been beeping.

“And, since I customized my security software, I can even verify that she’s the one we’re tracing.” He started moving faster now, using all four hands. I blinked, my eyes blurring as I tried to watch him.

“How?”

“I’ll use her own device to capture her DNA.”

“What if she isn’t touching it?”

“She is. Don’t borrow trouble. We’ll have enough of that trying to take the building she’s in.”

All out front assault was out. The Kardoval chose well. They were secured above a nursery full of young children. There was no way to get them out without alerting the rest of the building that there was something going on.

If nothing else, they were smart. Very, very smart. I guess having the capacity to access their genetic memories for every single skill made it inevitable that they’d be difficult to overthrow. Which was why it’d never happened before in their history.

Sort of made me sick to my stomach to think about, so I could only imagine how Garjah felt. Then again, his sense of justice and need to protect his people was always forefront in his mind, and that drove him. Even now, I could see him calculating and planning. We’d met up with a whole group of his security officers as well as several of the rebellion group, but I didn’t know any of them. I was sticking close to Garjah, and Bouncer was sticking close to me.

The rest of them gave us wide berth, but they were all looking to him. Good thing he was the best at what he did, even better than Mereval and her cronies. Sure, they were supposed to all be equal, but I knew she was the one who really pulled all their levers.

“We go in from the top.” Garjah pointed to a projected image of the building since we’d had to pull back. “Two officers, plus three volunteers go inside the ground floor to secure the young and exit. Seal off that entire floor so there’s no escape.” Two officers immediately raised their hands, and there were a few murmurs and two women and a male from the rebel group raised their hand to work with the children. “Good.”

“The rest of us will go in here. She’s still in this room, so we’re going straight for it. We’ll need burst cubes to dissolve the walls here.” He indicated space in the middle of the outer edge. “It’ll need to be large enough for at least two of us to go in at once, one to fire, one to cover.”

Garjah looked at them all seriously. “Stunning level only. We are not looking to kill the Kardoval; they must answer for their crimes in front of the people. Security suits set to maximum, however, they have no reason to keep you alive.”

Everyone nodded, their faces grim.

“Suits? You’ll have suits for this?” In all the time since I’d been on Ardra, I hadn’t seen any of them don a suit like I’d had on.

“Not quite like yours. Ours are more of an… outer layer. And it’s not made of metal; that is such a weak material.”

They were ready to go before I was. I was being left with Bouncer and an officer on the roof of the building where we’d dropped from a cloaked transport. I wasn’t happy, but I also didn’t want to swing halfway down a building into a hole where someone would be trying to kill me either.

My stomach roiled, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I hadn’t eaten in so long or because I was going to vomit. “We’ll be fine, I’m sure of it.” Garjah promised.

“Don’t promise something you can’t actually prove,” I said. “And be careful!”