Iq'her Read online

  Iq’her

  Conquered World: Book Nine

  Elin Wyn

  Contents

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Iq’her

  Stasia

  Epilogue: Stasia

  Takar: Sneak Peek

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  About the Author

  Iq’her

  General Rouhr let out a deep breath, sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. “Estimates on how long our food supplies will last?”

  “Unknown, sir. This could simply be a blight that is temporary or this could be the result of something far more sinister,” I answered. “When Sylor killed the first set of vines, the area under cultivation affected increased by nearly nineteen percent. In the subsequent weeks, with all of the vines that had comprised the dome now destroyed, the area increased at an alarming rate of just over thirty-seven percent. More than a third of the plants on this continent, half of which were used for food, are either dying or dead.”

  “How quickly will that affect us?” Rouhr asked.

  “If I were to put a timeframe to it, I would say at current levels of consumption and loss, less than a year.”

  This would create a problem of nearly apocalyptic proportions before too long. During the nearly a year that we’d been a part of the population, I’d noticed that many humans knew next to nothing of proper distribution, use, and storage of their perishable goods.

  Of course, I was a bit biased and perhaps a bit spoiled.

  While living on the Vengeance, the food simulators were capable of taking the most basic of edible materials and could turn them into meals.

  The simulators could take two tons of materials and feed sixty full-grown Valorni three meals a day for an entire year. The simulators aboard the Aurora were even more efficient.

  However, there was a slight problem.

  He let out a groan that sounded as though he had just been struck in the chest. “This is not something that I wanted to have to deal with,” he said quietly. He never mumbled, but I wondered if he had said those words more for himself than for me. He looked up at me and rubbed his hands together. “So, what are your suggestions?”

  “There are only two reasonable courses of action that we have, sir.” I sighed. “For long-term stability, both will require investigating if the Puppet Master is involved or not. We need to understand the connection between those vines and the rest of the planet’s ecosystem.”

  “Tell me.” He pursed his lips.

  “Rationing, or finding ways to create new and more efficient simulators.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “Could we build enough simulators?”

  I shook my head. “Even if we used every system from the Aurora, as well as every computer system in all of Nyheim and Duvest, we would not be able to create enough simulators to feed the entire population. We would be forced to eliminate nearly eleven percent of the population in order to feed them.”

  “And that’s obviously a terrible plan.” Rouhr sighed and shook his head. “What we need is to follow your original suggestion of rationing.” He clicked a button on his office comm unit. “Tobias?”

  Nothing.

  Another click, and static answered.

  “This thing hasn’t worked properly all week,” Rouhr muttered. “What does it take for a general to have working hardware?”

  “Would you like me to take a look, sir?” I offered.

  “No,” he waved the offer away. “I know resources are still tight. Everyone is doing the best they can, there’s just too much to do. I’ll wait my turn.”

  He stabbed the button again.

  “Sir?” finally came the response.

  “Bring me the records of our city-wide food stores, if you please,” Rouhr ordered. “And request that Vidia joins us, if you would.”

  “Will do, sir,” Tobias’ enthusiastic voice answered. I smiled at Tobias’ optimistic nature. He had taken the tragedy that came with our arrival in stride.

  “With the amount of food we have available, and I’m guessing based on the reports I read last week,” Rouhr started, “we’re going to have to share some of our food with the small settlements, and we still might not have enough.”

  “No, sir, we won’t. At least not in the long run. If every major city donates food to help out the smaller settlements, we will still only make it through a year,” I explained.

  “I know.” He sighed. “But it will help the smaller settlements stay alive, and that is what we need to focus on. We need to find a way to save everyone, if possible.”

  “And if it’s not possible, sir?”

  “I’m not going to think about that for now,” he answered. “Let’s concentrate on right now and what we can do to fix all of this.”

  I nodded.

  Tobias brought in the reports that Rouhr had requested and we spent the next hour reviewing them with Vidia.

  Finally, face tight with strain, Vidia looked up.

  “There’s really only one way to handle this, isn’t there.”

  Rouhr wrapped his hand over hers and nodded. “Rationing. There’s no choice.”

  Decision made, Vidia nodded sharply and rose. “I’ll start telling people, and start contacting the other cities. This affects us all.”

  She left, Tobias in her wake, noting down the items she’d already started dictating from the list in her head.

  “What about us, sir?”

  He sighed. “You and the teams are going to need to be on patrol to make sure that first, the Puppet Master doesn’t decide to stir up more trouble, and second, the people don’t start to riot. And then we’ll need to coordinate with the other settlements, arrange for distribution. You may need to set up guards for the food drops, just in case.”

  I nodded in understanding. It was the only reasonable way to proceed.

  As soon as Vidia and Rouhr announced that we would need to start rationing, people would become upset. They would start demanding answers, and without any immediate answers to give, those upset people would then become angry.

  Angry people weren’t likely to listen to reason or take kindly to being asked for patience.

  Rouhr reached for the desk comm. “Attention all strike teams. Effective immediately, we are instituting a mandatory food rationing system. I repeat, effective immediately, we are instituting a mandatory food rationing system. Meet immediately for details--”

  Tobias rushed into the office, face white.

  “Sir! The message… Your desk comm...”

  Rouhr stopped. “What about it?”

  The human male swallowed, then again. “It didn’t broadcast to just the strike teams’ channel.”

  Skrell.

  “Where. Did. It. Go?” Rouhr asked, every word falling like a stone into the suddenly heavy silence.

  “City-wide emergency broadcast,” Tobias whispered. “All over Nyheim.”

  “Skrell,” we said in unison.

  “You better get out there,” Rouhr commanded. “I’ll contact the other teams to let them know immediately.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I left
his office and headed for the armory. I was going to need some protection.

  Stasia

  “CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!” Everyone screamed as they banged the bottoms of their glasses against the counter. Roddik was standing on top of the counter, waving both arms in the air as he enticed the crowd.

  Only when he was satisfied with the noise, the window panes already rattling in their frames, did he bring his beer up to his mouth. With the expertise of a man that was used to drinking far too much, he downed his pint glass in no more than two seconds.

  The bar exploded with applause and congratulatory whistles, and the bartender went as far as handing Roddik a congratulatory free pitcher of beer. That wasn’t a good idea, the way I saw it, but what could I do? I was more than tired of playing the responsible-older-sister part, and it wasn’t like Roddik listened to anything I said anyway.

  Ventil was one of those hole-in-the-wall bars that seemed to be impermeable to whatever happened in the real world, and even a giant alien invasion hadn’t been enough for the owner to close its doors. No more than a watering hole, it still was my brother’s favorite place in the whole city.

  “C’mon, Stasia.” He laughed, climbing down from the counter and draping one arm over my shoulder. “Cheer up, will ya? The vines are gone, the sun is finally shining again...have a drink and put a smile on your face.”

  “I’m having a drink.” I held up my own beer. “And I am smiling.” At that, I forced my lips to curl up and showed Roddik what must’ve looked like a snarl.

  With a dismissive laugh, he pulled me closer to him.

  “You should really lighten up, sis.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s hard to lighten up after working double shifts all week long,” I said, but Roddik was no longer paying attention.

  He, along with all the other men in the bar, had turned toward the various screens that lined the far wall of the room. The screens had been turned off just moments ago but, all of a sudden, they lit up with the city’s emblem and the word STANDBY glowing under it.

  “Attention, attention,” a raspy deep voice boomed through the speakers mounted next to the screens. As for the image, it remained the same, the word STANDBY replaced with PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT. “Ladies and gentlemen of Nyheim. We’ve just been told that effective immediately, the city government is instituting a mandatory food rationing system. I repeat, effective immediately, they are instituting a mandatory food rationing system. Further information will be available from the coalition government in two days.”

  When the announcement ended, there was no more raucous laughter inside Ventil. Instead, there was just a deep silence, one that was fraught with tension. What were the city officials thinking?

  The whole city was still reeling from the vine incident, and now they mandated a rationing system out of the blue?

  “This is fucking bullshit,” Roddik spat, slamming his glass down on the counter. The foam sloshed over the rim, splattering on the greasy metal counter and making a few of the men pull their elbows back. Roddik gritted his teeth hard, a furious expression on his face, and pointed toward the dark screens. “Who the hell do these people think they are? Food rationing? We were going hungry just a week ago!”

  While most of the men nodded their agreement, I merely sighed. Roddik had never really cared about pretty much anything, let alone politics or government. That changed after the Xathi invasion, and his political rants were a constant reminder of how much life had changed in Nyheim.

  “Damn right, Roddik!” A burly man shouted from the other end of the bar, wiping the beer foam from his beard with the back of his hand. “We’re not their alien soldiers. We’re not their subjects!”

  “Damn right we’re not!” another voice cried.

  “They didn’t even care to tell us why,” another protested, and it didn’t take long before the bar was housing a chorus of protests and complaints against the sudden rationing system.

  The dome had cut all of Nyheim’s supply lines for long enough that most of the people in this bar had gotten to know hunger intimately.

  Now that the vines had been driven back, most people were looking forward to trying to rebuild their lives, picking up the pieces that were left after the Xathi war.

  Some people had nothing left.

  They’d created new lives in shanty towns built out of scraps, worked together to make new jobs, to create new markets and trading economies.

  And then some people hadn’t.

  Hadn’t been able to bounce back, even to crawl back into a path that was anything like what their normal lives were before the Xathi and the rest of the aliens had torn through our sky.

  Maybe they were too traumatized.

  Maybe there weren’t enough resources in place to get them the help they needed.

  I looked at Roddik and his friends through narrowed eyes. And maybe some just didn't want to.

  I sighed, shaking my head. I couldn't tell what was going on in anyone else's head. I shouldn’t judge.

  Everything had been hard all around.

  And whatever was going on with this announcement of rationing, it would put a wrench in everyone’s plans.

  “Tell you what,” Roddik started, climbing up on the counter. This time, though, no one was chanting. The mood was somber, and I could already see that it’d become even more so in the days to come. “I’ve had it with these fucking assholes!” Roddik cried out at the top of his lungs, a vein throbbing on his forehead. The crowd shouted out its agreement, and I simply sunk deeper into my seat.

  Why the hell was I wasting my day off like this?

  I should just get up and go home but, somehow, I found myself glued to my seat as I observed Roddik. Even though people were eating up what he was saying, I could tell he had already had one drink too many. I couldn’t drag him home, but if I left, I was pretty sure he’d get into trouble.

  “These aliens come here, bringing war and death, and we’re supposed to accept their rule?” Roddik continued, his voice reaching a feverish pitch. “Seriously, does anyone really believe our lives are better because of them? Just look at this city. Nyheim used to prosper before these creatures came here. Now half the houses lie in ruins, and the people we love are going hungry! How much more of this are we supposed to take?”

  I leaned back in my seat, slowly drinking my beer as I took in the scene. Most people were nodding furiously as Roddik spoke, and some of them were looking at him with more than just admiration.

  It was an unbelievable scene: Roddik had never been a leader of men, and I seriously doubted this was the right time for him to turn into one.

  “But what the hell are we supposed to do?” someone a few tables behind me grumbled. “You want to fight those things, boy?”

  Roddik seemed stumped for a few seconds, and I could almost see the gears turning inside his head as he thought of an answer.

  “We don’t need to fight,” he finally said, his eyes burning with a kind of determination I wasn’t used to seeing there. “I know that Nyheim’s no longer our home. The aliens have become our rulers, I’ve accepted that. Thing is, we don’t have to stay here. They might want to rule the city, but they’ll never rule us!”

  “DAMN RIGHT!” A few people cried out. These drunken dumbasses looked more than ready to march down the city’s main avenue and protest against their imaginary alien invasion.

  They had a point.

  There was no denying that life had become exponentially harder after the aliens arrived here, but who was to say they were the direct cause of all our grief?

  I’d be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but too bad they were doing a poor job of explaining their point of view to the masses.

  As unbelievable as it was, most people still had no idea where the Xathi had come from, or why the hell Nyheim ended up encased in a vine dome.

  I had no idea, and neither did anyone else.

  Communication from high above had always been similar to the food rationing warning we just rec
eived: it was always a summary listing of what they wanted us to do, no real explanation given.

  Sure, the government was entirely human. People like Vidia still held to their titles, but how much of their power did they really have with the aliens in town?

  The way I saw it, the one really in charge now was that alien general.

  Not that any of it mattered.

  Humans or aliens...they all kept the populace in the dark.

  “Who’s with me?” Roddik asked. “We can leave Nyheim behind and start our own colony. No aliens, no war, no food rationing. Just us and the product of our own work.”

  That did it.

  The moment Roddik was done, everyone in the room jumped to their feet and started clapping, some of them already chanting Roddik’s name as if he was some goddamn hero.

  I knew that when the morning came, and with it some brutal hangovers, a lot of these idiots would have already forgotten about this stupid rebellion.

  But not everyone.

  I worried all the same: Roddik was planting some dangerous seeds in his buddies’ heads.

  “What do you say, Stasia?” Roddik finally turned to me, the only person in the room that hadn’t gotten up from her seat. “Are you with us, or what?”

  I sighed.

  Part of me just wanted to punch Roddik for putting me in the spotlight. The other half wondered about the possibilities. I wasn’t that attached to Nyheim, anyway, and moving out of this place could be the fresh start a lot of us needed…

  Pushing my chair back, I rose to my feet.

  “I’m with you, Roddik,” I said, tipping my beer toward him. He smiled at me, beaming with pride, and that almost made it all worth it.