Battle for Cascadia, The Second Book of The Gaia Wars by Kenneth G. Bennett

Author:Kenneth G. Bennett [Bennett, Kenneth G.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2011-11-14T04:30:00+00:00

Todd Jr. sat clutching the medallion in a small clearing one mile below the ridge. Uhlgoth’s soldiers rested on the ground all around him. Junior guessed their number at about two thousand, though if his eyes had been shut, he might have guessed zero. There was no talking. Junior noticed with alarm that there was no breathing, either. There was no movement of any kind, in fact. Uhlgoth had shut his troops down with a burst of deafening clicks, and shut down they remained. It was an army of statues. And it gave Junior the creeps.

He stared, as a mosquito crawled across the face of the nearest soldier. The Fabrinel’s eyes were open. The mosquito hopped onto the creature’s gaping left eyeball and turned this way and that, seeking a blood vessel, but not finding one. The soldier did not blink.

Junior shivered. He knew the “statue soldiers” could wake up in an instant. A command from his father was all it would take.

He turned three hundred and sixty degrees. Where was his father? The big man had hurried away with a small contingent of Fabrinels ten minutes earlier. Where had they gone? When would they return? Junior sat back and studied the medallion, which was still in its thick envelope of glass; or what looked like glass.

Truth be told, Junior felt better than he had in days. He’d found a US Army backpack at the edge of the clearing, and the pack was full of food: trail mix, Gatorade, Meals-Ready-to-Eat. Junior knew from TV that Meals-Ready-to-Eat, or MREs, were meals soldiers took into the field. It was bland, boring food. But it was food. And it was making him strong again.

Junior didn’t want to think about the owner of the backpack, though he knew deep down that his father’s troops had probably killed the person. The notion disturbed him greatly, so he tried to focus on the medallion. He’d asked his father if he could hold it. To his surprise, the big man had given it to him.

Junior gasped. The glass around the medallion was suddenly shrinking, melting; like ice. He cried out and dropped the relic on the ground.

“It’s not my fault,” he whispered, though no one was listening. “I didn’t do anything!”

Junior glanced at the soldiers around him. No reaction. No movement. Not the faintest rustle.

Slowly, he retrieved the medallion. The glass envelope had vanished entirely and the gold felt heavy and smooth in his hand. He lifted the flashing relic to his eyes, and jammed his thumb against its obsidian core, thinking back to words his father had spoken hours earlier.

Professor Steele and Alvin Peeples (or rather, the disembodied machine intelligence of the two men) would “solve the riddle” of the medallion, his father had said. That was the reason for the glass envelope, Junior recalled. Bizarre as it seemed, Steele and Peeples had been circulating inside the glass, unlocking the relic’s secrets.

Had they succeeded? Is that why the envelope was gone? Junior pressed the obsidian harder and suddenly something leapt from the relic into his head.

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