One quick sting to end the agony. Like a vaccine for her pain. It would be so easy... to leave the pain behind, to just let go. She leaned forward just a little more. To be free. To experience it first-hand. To have a moment of the freedom which had enthralled first her long-lost husband, and then her two sons. To feel the air pushing against her, and then emptiness…Release. Freedom from pain; from responsibility.
Responsibility. She wished she could forget that. There were still responsibilities holding her to the world. She leaned still further forward, unable to find those responsibilities through the cloud in her mind. It would be so easy...to be free....to be Released from the world…but, there something stopped her. Something held her back. A hand on her shoulder. Not Anna’s. A man’s hand… so familiar. Her son. Her one remaining son. The ground. Her son. Release. Responsibility.
Her son’s hand on her shoulder, the concrete reality of that remaining responsibility, brought the two conflicting thoughts cascading through her mind, banishing the fog which hung there. Her hands shook as she realized the brink from which she had just returned. She turned, falling into the arms of her son, finally beginning to truly weep. He clutched her to his breast, and wept with her anew.
***
Anna watched them for a moment, and felt a certain relief at the sound of actual release in her friend’s tears. The two of them were completely absorbed in themselves and each other. She quietly set out a couple of glasses of water and a box of tissue, and carefully withdrew. They needed their privacy, and she needed her rest.
Anna woke in the heart of the night, having slept through the afternoon and evening, her first real sleep in days. She crept into the living room and found the two of them still there on the couch, asleep. Tears dried on their faces, even in sleep they clutched at each other, the last family they had left. A mixed feeling of both great relief and great sadness for them welled up within her. At least they were not alone in this.
Eventually they carefully ushered Alicia to bed, making every effort not to rouse the woman more than necessary. Her friend followed them easily enough, though tears fell from her eyes as soon as they were opened. There were a few mutters about ‘needing to leave’, whatever that meant. Anna patted her soothingly, glad that at last the tears were coming and the healing could begin. She returned to the living room and situated Santiner so that he would not wake up sore, tucking a blanket over him.
The full night’s sleep helped, but two days of wakefulness took more than a night’s sleep to recover from. Her body still felt tired, but not ready to sleep again just yet. A knot of tension remained between her shoulder blades. She’d not have thought that weeping would ever be a welcome sound but, compared to the oppressive silence of the last few days, it had sounded nearly as music.
Searching for a way to relieve the rest of her tension and gather strength for the days to come, Anna ran herself a hot bath. She soaked away the lingering tension of the last few days, and the heat banished the last of the emotional residue which sleep had not cleansed. She rose from the tub with the stars still shining through The Night Cloud -as her friends referred to the nebula kept at bay by their sun’s solar wind- feeling renewed and strengthened.
The feeling brought no great joy. Anna knew the long battle for sanity which lay ahead with her friend. The same battle her friend had helped her fight a few short years ago, which left scars on her heart still. She now felt, however, that she could at least face it with strength instead of weariness. She dried herself off and lowered herself back into bed, finally slipping into a truly peaceful sleep.
***
Alicia woke, in bed, to the smell of bacon. She didn’t remember moving to bed, and had a slight ache from head to toe, but some of the weight had gone from inside. The smell of bacon caused her stomach to remind her that it had been ignored for quite some time. As she rose from the bed her body joined in the protest. She had barely moved for two days, and that, coupled with the stress, had pushed old muscles as badly as any marathon. Her body’s pain mirrored that of her battered soul, but at least she could actually feel it now.
Her son had tipped the first water over the damn, and the grief had begun to flow. It would still be a long time, she knew, before the ache became anything that could ever be called ‘manageable’, but now, at least, it could be experienced and worked through.
Alicia sat on the bed, looking around her home. It no longer felt like hers. This death, this second loss, had ripped away all connection to it. The pictures of her dear late husband, and the ones of her two sons, were the only things which stirred any emotion at all…and even then, it felt bittersweet at best. She gazed out the window at the flyers tracing the circle cut from the mountain which formed the courtyard far below. The sight of them held nothing for her anymore. Once she could watch those men fly, and her mind would take her up to join with them. Her heart followed as echoes of her lost husband’s whispers played through her mind. She could all but feel the wind under the wings, the way the currents teased the feathers, the bite of the air in a banking turn.
Now, nothing. Her one remaining son had no wings, and it felt as if hers had been clipped.
A last look around the room confirmed the conviction that she could not stay here, this place was no longer a part of her. She had lived more than two decades here, two good decades. Inside these walls she had raised two sons; Sons who had never known their father. He had been a good man, dedicated and loving. He’d once had one of his feathers trapped in resin for her. It now stood as one of her prize possessions.
When he died the Legion had moved her from the CentGov capital of Landing to Legion HQ. She took up teaching to give herself a purpose, something to do, and to provide some more income to raise Korla. A few years later they had even gone a step further, when asked, and become pregnant with another child from him her late husband, using the DNA they had on file. She hadn’t wanted Korla to grow up alone…and now she had nothing left but that second son.
No, she couldn’t stay here. A few short, but eternal, days ago this apartment had been Home. It had been vibrant, bright, and echoed with memories of the laughter of her two boys and their friends. She’d felt connected to it in a primal way, one either way above or way below the normal senses. No more. Her spiritual connection to this place had died with her son, it felt as though the color had faded from it. They were, of course, still there, but now they were dull… barely noticeable. The only colors in the room which looked real were the photos. Her husband, her sons. All else was void.
A silent nod in the morning darkness felt like a promise to self. She would leave, and take nothing else: Only the pictures, herself, and her son. They would start a new life, far away from the Legion and its precious war with a few rabble rousers, somewhere that the madness of the world would let them be. There were no other surviving heirs to her lost husband. The Legion would be forced to let him out. They would go.
With decisions made and a course set, Alicia could finally dry the tears which had already formed in the few minutes since returning from sleep. A path existed now, a course to follow. Only time could bring healing to these terrible wounds, and she needed something to keep her from dwelling on those wounds so that time could do its work. She put on her slippers and went to face her friend and her son, to tell them what she had to do and why.
Chapter 7
Lucas sat at his desk reviewing reports. He hated dealing with reports, but accepted it. It seemed sometimes that The Column ran on reports. Food produced, food consumed, items bought from Outside, items sold Outside, precautions to make sure that goods and purchases could not be traced back, intelligence reports….and he only had to look at the stuff his secretaries felt important enough to pass on to him. Most of the items were approved using the comments of the secretary who had reviewed it and sent it on. He understood the importance of occasionally checking what those folks did, but had to balance that with the need to not get bogged down in minutia.
The reports on fo
od troubled him. They were getting nowhere in attempts to create meat-vats. What little protein they had came from the small amount of fish that could be caught underground, a few small herds of cattle, and what they smuggled in from outside. Crops, particularly grains, were their primary food staple. Things were already at the point where a reduction in the ability to bring in grain from Outside would result in severe rationing, and a shortage of any kind would put a lot of people at the risk of starvation.
He spent some minutes pondering a request for funds to build another hydroponics greenhouse tower in Koton Sanctuary. They needed food too badly, despite the immense layout in manpower and resources required to build those things. The greenhouses were vital to their survival, even with the anemic nature of the grain they produced. Modern crops were the product of over-zealous genetic engineers who found –too late- that their modifications to increase yield and insect resistance also reduced the nutrition of the product and made it more difficult to grow.
The reduced nutritional value meant that people had to eat more, so more of it had to be grown, but the frailty of the crops made that difficult. Furthermore, the genetic code of these crops had been so heavily tampered with that making any modifications to them almost always did more harm than good, and no one had thought to save samples of the base strains. He shook his head ruefully and approved the greenhouse construction, resisting the urge to mark it as a speed-priority target.
He sighed at another request, to start a kelp-farming operation somewhere, and half a dozen possible sights were specified. It couldn’t be done, despite how useful they would be. Some people just didn’t want to understand that, though Column subs did not show up on CentGov’s satellites, kelp farms did. He started to write this explanation, again, but lost patience and put a note to refer to a previous decision. As nice as some kelp farms would be- as nice as some fresh kelp would be- they couldn’t take the risk.
The item he had been searching for finally came to the top of the pile: the video of the Legion base which had seemed to be preparing to attack Koton. This tactic troubled him greatly. Those craft with the scanners were doing their job for real, trying very hard to find a Sanctuary, but the precautions taken (and the tons and tons of rock between any Sanctuary and the surface) meant that they had almost no chance of success. CentGov had probably figured this out, however, and come up with this psychological-warfare tactic. The intelligence boys had reviewed the observations of these craft, and found that his hunch had been dead-on.
Every so often one of those scanners would send a coded burst – different each time – and speed back to the base it operated from. That base would then become a swarm of activity, all aimed at making it appear that they were preparing for a major assault.
A detailed review of the recordings from the Legion base made it fairly clear what went on. Men and equipment were moved from one place to another, craft flew in high from various locations, and craft snuck out under the cover of the rest of the activity only to very visibly return, making it look like even more force had come to bear. This tactic had a fairly obvious overt goal, and had nearly worked. If the Legion could spook the leader of a Sanctuary into believing that they had been found then they didn’t actually have to find the place.
Lindar had been correct when pointing out the second, hidden, danger, however. It took too long to analyze the movements inside a Legion base. No determination of whether they faced a threat or a ruse could be made until too late for them to begin an evacuation. He could very easily see becoming lulled into a false sense of security, treating something like this as a non-concern only to find out, too late, that the Sanctuary in question had actually been located.
He penned a note for all Sanctuary leaders to that effect, and gave them a new protocol to deal with this sort of situation. Each time this happened they would have to go through all preparations for evacuation, load everyone up in transports, and wait for a military command to either flee or stand down.
Lucas penned a second order to the military commanders, giving general guidelines on how he wanted them to deploy their forces in such a situation. He trusted the military and civilian leaders to use his directions to best effect, but knew it to be a bad solution. Any given Sanctuary could only be expected to respond to this sort of thing a handful of times before residents became complacent. If CentGov kept this up too long, the weariness of his population would become a major factor. After some consideration he decided to bring it up with others and get ideas before trying to poke at the problem further.
With that done, the reports on his desk went from tedious to feeling like an obstruction. He stared at his screens for a few minutes and had to fight for any comprehension at all. Then the words ran together, and he had to give up. All low-priority items got marked as ‘approved’, and the search began for a particular item which should have been in the stack somewhere began.
Yes, there it was. Request for approval to re-brand and change the ID on Joshua’s cargo-hauler, give the man the necessary surgical and genetic alterations, and then release him. The request had a note of pleading to it, as if those writing it wished him to hurry. A light smile formed as he marked the papers ‘approved’. No doubt that pilot had been difficult in all sorts of ways. A moment’s thought brought an addendum to the order, telling them to give the man the choice of having his own craft retrofitted or being provided with a slight upgrade from the cargo fleet. They needed all the good will they could get these days, and hopefully the choice would salve the pilot’s anger.
Lucas wiped his hands down his face, trying to push the fog of the reports from his mind. Other matters demanded his attention. Things like that young flyer he’d brought in. Someone as dedicated, loyal, passionate, driven, and highly moral as that kid could be a great asset to The Column…if he could be made to see what sort of monsters he had given his loyalty to. If. They generally preferred to let such young men find things out for themselves, at least a little, and try to capture them before CentGov martyred them. Maybe a visit would help put his fears about the young man at ease.
A recent intelligence raid had included profiles from the Academy. This included Korla's file, which he read on the walk to the hospital. He didn't get far before his wings began to twitch in irritation. The boy probably had no idea why most of his classmates had seemed so distant from him. The young men and women from influential families, from places of power, would know what he represented and either try to manipulate him or steer clear. Probably mostly the latter, the kid showed up as smart enough to be difficult to manipulate.
The Academy’s screeners always let a few like him through. They could prove excellent poster boys if they could not be turned, typically serving as popular heroes…until they were given orders specifically designed to lead to their deaths, turning them into martyrs for the regime. Korla’s file showed him to be a ‘true believer’: moral, convicted, dedicated to truth and justice. His father had been a flyer of low birth, dead at the hands of the mob. He would have been a wonderful recruit for The Column in a few years or so, after he’d gotten a good sense of how things really worked as opposed to the things he had been told. Apparently, his superiors thought so as well.
Everything in his file looked routine on the surface, but a properly jaundiced eye could see his brief future spelled out all too clearly. Korla’s good looks, superior skills, command potential, and general charisma had him slated to become one of their great poster boys. There were already notes in his file about special training to deal with the press. They were going to make him popular, well known, then send him on a ‘special’ mission as soon he asked too many questions. Lucas had no idea if they could have gotten to him in time, but liked to hope so.
Identifying and capturing intended martyrs tended to be tough, though. As often as not, those ‘poster boys’ were very well aware of the realities of the world, and were happily doing their part in order to gain a piece of the pie. They would have their time in the spotlight then capitalize on t
heir celebrity status by going into politics, or their deaths would be faked and their identities changed.
A number of the ‘poster boys’ where men like Korla, though. Good men, strung along for as long as they were useful. Who better to make the lies believable than one who believed them himself?
These lies let a few hundred people, maybe as many as a couple of thousand, keep the entire world’s population in a state of near serfdom. These elites had total freedom of action, and no accountability to anyone but each other. Of course, that accountability only became an issue if they failed to ‘cover any loose ends’ which could cause the public to grow a spine, or one did something to annoy one another. They kept the population busy, hurried, always working and always in fear of losing that ever-important income.
In some areas, mostly the large population centers, the polite fictions of freedom and liberty were maintained. When the infighting of the elite spilled into the streets, the blame fell on his Fifth Column (and, by extension, him), or the actions of the ‘Mob’, and used as an excuse to squeeze even more from the people at large.
In less populated areas, further from the cameras of the ‘free’ media, the fiction often grew very thin. Petty men, angry at being assigned to outlying areas and being out of ‘the race’ tended to rule their domains quite harshly. Everything looked smooth enough on the surface. After all, such colonies were dangerous. It would shock and appall the general public if they had any idea how many of the ‘accidents’ which occurred in those towns happened to people who seemed less than content, or who offended some petty bureaucrat.
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