Nicholas Smith - Allegiance

He paused to watch as several veterans led the new recruits and volunteers. Many of the greenhorns, surprisingly, had come from the Cazador military. Who would have thought so many of them wanted to join the “sky gods,” as they referred to his people.

His heart thumped with longing to be up there again.

But he was just a retired, grumpy old man now, and he had business to attend to this afternoon. Miles nudged up against him as if to say, Keep moving, boss.

“We’re late, I know,” X said.

Miles wagged his tail, and his crystal-blue eyes seemed to brighten in the mat of graying fur. The dog was only about twelve years old, but even with the genetic modifications, he was aging and, like any other creature, starting to slow down.

He wasn’t the only one. Despite feeling great, X couldn’t run quite as fast or jump quite as far.

“You and I are starting to geeze, old buddy,” X murmured.

He reached down, and Miles lapped at his scarred wrist. There was nothing in the world like the love of a dog. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing Miles like so many others he had grown close to over the years.

The clank of boots sounded ahead, snapping him out of his melancholy train of thought.

Several militia guards patrolled the docks ahead, keeping an eye on the boats. Two more guards stood in front of the elevator that would take X to the top of the capitol oil rig, from which el Pulpo had ruled his people. It was now under the militia’s command, but Cazadores still lived here—mostly accountants, scribes, and wealthier merchants who kept the economy humming.

X continued toward the platform. The militia guards there wore black armor, but instead of the batons they had carried on the Hive , they had automatic rifles.

Red airship symbols with a “V” through the middle marked their helmet crests and their chests.

“Coming down,” one of soldiers said.

The cage at the top of the lift rattled its way down to the marina while X waited. He turned back to watch the divers in the western sky.

A moment later, the elevator clanked and the door opened. Freshly promoted Lieutenant Lauren Sloan, leader of the militia, stood there with her arms folded across her armored chest, clearly annoyed.

“King Rodriguez,” she said gruffly. “You’re late .”

“No, you’re late,” X replied. “I’ve been here thirty minutes waiting for a ride up.” He grinned and looked at the two guards. “Right, fellas?”

They exchanged a glance, then nodded unconvincingly.

“Whatever you say, King Xavier,” Sloan said. “Now, can we get going?”

“When you stop calling me ‘King,’ sure,” X replied.

“You are indeed a king,” boomed another voice.

X turned as another soldier jumped from a boat onto the dock. This man was no militia guard. The dark, brawny fighter lumbered across the platform, the shaft of a double-headed spear gripped in his massive hand.

“You earned the title, Xavier Rodriguez,” Rhino said.

The warrior also had a new rank, now that X had bumped him up from lieutenant all the way to general. The promotion had not sat well with Vargas, Forge, and Moreto, the three colonels next in line.

Rhino stopped a few feet away and tapped one point of his spear on the dock. Then he pounded his metal armor, which still bore the insignia of the Barracudas.

“It was your destiny to become king,” he said.

X snorted. He didn’t want to be a king or a leader of any sort. He just wanted to retire and live out his days with Miles, a fishing pole, and a mug of shine.

The only rest you’re going to get is when you’re dead, old man.

“King, Commander, Immortal, Xavier, X—whatever you want to be called, we need to get going,” Sloan said. She stepped aside to let X and Rhino into the elevator. Miles moved inside between X’s legs.

The gate closed, and the cage started up toward the airship rooftop. The vantage gave the occupants a view of the latest construction project in the Vanguard Islands.

“They’re almost ready,” Sloan said of the oil rig that had been retrofitted with a single platform. Two ships were anchored alongside, their decks busy with cranes and other construction equipment.

The rig was one of twenty-one inside the territory and was about to become one of the most important. There were other rigs that also played vital roles in the darkness outside the Vanguard Islands, including a prison rig known as the Shark’s Cage, and several fuel outposts that X had just learned about. The Cazadores had a manned facility in Venezuela, called Bloodline, and another, the Iron Reef, in Belize. Both outposts held their precious fresh gasoline and diesel fuel, thanks to a fuel stabilizer that ITC chemical engineers had developed before the war.

“I could never do that,” Rhino said, looking at another team of Hell Divers sailing over the water. Their canopies were slowly spiraling down toward the ship waiting for them in the limpid blue water.

One of the divers narrowly missed the deck and splashed into the sea. A rider on a Jet Ski sped over the waves to fish him out before he could get ensnared in his lines.

“It’s great training,” X said. “Something I would have loved to have when I was just a greenhorn. When I first started, we dove blind as bats through storms.”

Several of the divers on the decks had stowed their chutes and used their boosters to pull them back into the sky. Discovery ’s belly poked through the clouds, the open launch bay sucking them up like a whale swallowing fish.

Back from its third journey into the wastes, the airship had yet to find a single survivor. The Hive , too, had been searching for isolated pockets of humanity, with nothing to show for its twenty-plus missions.

The only dive with real promise of finding human life had ended with the death of Trey Mitchells, ambushed in Jamaica by a team of defectors. The machines had beaten Team Raptor to the signal, killing the survivors living in a bunker under the prison, and destroying the cryo chambers that housed other people and animals.

Discovery had dropped a low-yield nuclear bomb that ended the threat, but X knew that more teams of defectors were out there, hunting humans. The Cazador logbooks documented several encounters over the decades.

X’s most important job now was to make sure the machines never found the Vanguard Islands, and, if they did, to protect both sky people and Cazadores.

The battle for the islands, plus Trey’s death, had brought the sky people’s numbers down to just 402 people—even with the recent births, less than half their numbers of only a decade ago.

And this was why X hadn’t authorized a single mission since Trey’s death two months ago. It was time to protect and defend what they had, not risk more lives in an effort to save potential survivors in the wastes.

The elevator cage clanked to a stop, and Rhino opened the gate to the rooftop. A line of palm trees swayed in the wind. Evidence of the pitched battle for the capitol rig was everywhere X looked: bullet-holed palm trunks, and gouges in the dirt where damaged trees had been blasted over.

Rodger Mintel had put all the wood to good use, though, in the new shop that his parents, Cole and Bernie, had started on the trading-post rig. They were two of the first people X saw on the rooftop when he stepped out of the cage.

The Mintels had gathered with a group of mostly former residents of the Hive , but some Cazadores were here as well, including wealthy merchants, scribes, and farmers.

Several of the people Katrina liberated from the Cazador container ship before the battle had also joined them on the rooftop. Among those rescued were Victor and Ton, the two leaders who had joined the militia. They had gained some weight over the past few months, but both men were still thin under their armor—especially Ton, who couldn’t speak after losing his tongue to the Cazadores.