XCOM 2- Resurrection by Greg Keyes

Author:Greg Keyes
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781785651229
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2020-04-28T03:32:31.902000+00:00

CHAPTER 13

THE WESTERN GHATS were mountains in the southwest of the Indian subcontinent. The part of the range they were interested in lay in what had once been the state of Kerala. Civilization there was old, and it had formed the hub of the spice trade for millennia. Black pepper, nutmeg, cloves from the distant islands of Maluku all passed through the port at Cochin. Indeed, so important was Kerala that Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal decided it ought to be conquered, so beginning an era of colonialism that wouldn’t end until the twentieth century.

Now Kerala, like the rest of planet Earth, had new colonizers.

Much of the Ghats had always been thinly populated—the population of Kerala had lived mostly along the coast. This was now doubly the case—the Ghats were contagion zones, and strictly off limits. But whereas Kerala had once had an extensive backwater transportation system of inland waters, rivers, and canals, outside of New Kochi, these backwaters had not been maintained, and years of flooding and meandering had taken their toll, turning them into messy, brackish marshes.

Which made them an excellent place to hide the Elpis. The real challenge was finding a place deep enough that the ship would not be revealed at high tide. It took a little patience, but in the end they found such a place.

The plan was for Sam and Amar to lead an expedition to discover if the ship was still there after all these years and in sound enough shape to be worth their time. The elder Dr. Shen was better, but the way was going to be physically demanding, and Sam wanted to delay his journey there until it was deemed necessary. That meant that Lily was going instead, and she was taking Lena as an assistant.

Amar had deeply mixed feelings about this. In his time on board the Elpis, he had come to realize that Lily was not only healthier than her father but also that she was far brighter—and that was saying something. He didn’t know what her IQ was, but it had to be off the charts. From their description, a handful of notes, and an examination of Lena, she had not only figured out how the bio-implant worked but also built a detector that would expose that sort of device. Of the two Shens, Lily was the least expendable.

But she was also stubborn, and she outranked him.

(Having Lena in harm’s way didn’t settle easily on his shoulders either.)

For his people, he chose Chitto, Nishimura, and Dux, who was by that time pretty well mended. DeLao’s arm was still stiff. To round things out, he added Chakyar, a young man originally from Dubai. He had some medical training and spoke Malayalam, the predominant language of the area. He was only twenty-three, but he already had a streak of gray in his otherwise black hair and eyes like a summer sky.

They made their way over the crumbling infrastructure to Piravom, a settlement on the outskirts of New Kochi that was supposed to have a resistance cell tucked away in it.

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