Freedom Forged

by Alan Austin

  Seeing how close he was, he kicked his horse into a full gallop. None of the others followed suit, but he was happy to ride the last distance alone.

  What had first appeared to be just over the next hill turned out to be quite a bit further than Sam had believed. He crested the first hill only to see another, and then repeated that same disappointing result four more times before he’d nearly lost hope riding over the fifth, identical green hill. When the sight of the river, the train, and the massive resistance camp came into view, he nearly cried in relief. He continued all the way down the hill and into the camp at full speed. He could see their airship from the hill and went straight for it, hoping to find familiar faces when he arrived.

  Boomer was standing at the base of the ramp waiting for him when he arrived. He’d just sent Mac to get Rosalyn, who he claimed had been the most anxious when Sam and the others hadn’t made it back as scheduled. Boomer rattled off a million questions, asking what had happened and where the women were. Seeing Sam alone clearly rattled him, but Sam assured the man that Grease was alright and not far behind with Navada and a few Resistance soldiers they’d picked up along the way.

  The mixed emotions he felt about Rosalyn still churned in his mind after hearing that she’d been so anxious to see him, but Sam was glad to hear that she was already on her way. Sam dismounted the horse, and the moment his feet hit the dirt, Boomer threw his arms around his friend and gave him a big squeeze and narrowed his many questions to one single summary.

  “You had us all freaked out there. What happened?”

  Sam took a deep breath and said, “We weren’t able to use one of the propeller’s charges for some reason and had to ditch off the coast. Grease did a hell of a job, considering I was wedged in a cubby in the back and we couldn’t talk. It’s a minor miracle that any of us made it, most of all me. It was a rough landing, but not as bad as what you and I went through back at town.”

  Boomers eyes went wide and he shook his head as the memories of being thrashed atop the diver’s wings returned. Sam nearly laughed when the other man’s hand went to his ribs, which were likely still just as sore as Sam’s were. The long horse ride had done nothing to ease his pain, but that was all secondary for him at the moment. The pain didn’t matter. Answers from Rosalyn were all that mattered.

  His need to make sense of the news he’d received was likely the only thing keeping him on his feet at this point. Sam was run ragged, but he was hell-bent on not letting his exhaustion get in the way of the answers he needed. He had a child! Rosalyn wasn’t trying to hurt him. There was a chance to make things right, and he needed to know what that all looked like.

  Shifting his gaze off to the side, he saw Mac and Rosalyn walking toward them. She was back in her signature white top, always tied above her naval to show off her figure, with her black bra showing. Sam, and any other man with a pulse, couldn’t help but be drawn by her incredible figure. It was nearly a distraction, even with the truth of what he needed to discuss at the forefront of his mind.

  As she neared, he planned to ask her to talk in private, but he never got the chance. Stunning everyone, Rosalyn drew her pistol only a few paces away and leveled it at Sam’s face. Sam nearly choked on the words that had just started to form on his lips.

  “I’m taking Sam and the airship, right now!” she barked, her voice not quite as convincing as she intended.

  Sam could feel his anger rise the moment she spoke, but he heard her through the filter of knowing that there was more at play than what everyone could see on the surface. His feelings changed quickly to fear that someone might take a shot at her before things could calm down.

  “You BITCH!” Boomer shouted at her. “I thought that – just maybe – you were coming to your senses, but you ARE working for the British. I should have thrown you off the ship when I had the chance, you stupid whore!”

  Sam had been equally shocked at her actions, but the other man’s words still burned him, and he turned away from the barrel of her pistol and punched his friend right in the face for insulting her so harshly.

  “What the hell!” both Boomer and Mac shouted, looking at Sam like he’d lost his mind.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about – and don’t you ever call her a whore again!” Sam shouted, adding even more confusion to both men’s expressions.

  He looked back to Rosalyn, who looked just as confused as the two men and said, “I know about our little girl. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  A whole series of emotions washed over Rosalyn’s face, one after the other. She seemed to grow more exhausted by the second, and without saying a word she dropped the gun and fell to her knees, sobbing in anguish.

  “I wanted to!” she shouted. “They’ll kill her now. When they find out you know, they’ll just kill her!”

  Sam pulled the woman he still loved to her feet and wrapped his arms around her, holding her in a way he hadn’t for so long, but feeling like no time had passed at all since they were together. All his anger was gone. All the resentment he’d held onto, even as he’d ridden back to confront her, was just wiped away; he could see so clearly how much this had pained her to do. He knew all at once that she still loved him. Why she’d chosen to leave or felt that she couldn’t tell him was a mystery, but she didn’t do it out of spite. It was still confusing, but as he held her, he realized that the past didn’t matter in the end; he knew their love would transcend their troubled history.

  “I love you,” she sobbed into his chest. “I’m so sorry, Sam!”

  “I love you too,” Sam replied, looking over and seeing the other two men dumbfounded, with Boomer rising back to his feet after the blow that had knocked him down.

  Mac was the next to speak, asking, “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  The other men were still as confused as ever, clearly unable to follow the very dramatic series of revelations.

  “She’s not spying on us by choice. She left because she was pregnant and didn’t want to tell me.”

  Rosalyn pushed him back, looking at him with what looked like pain in her eyes. “I wanted to tell you! You didn’t want to know the truth. You insisted that you didn’t want a family, and I wasn’t going to make you face that. I wanted you to show me that you were open to the idea so we could raise our child together, but you didn’t want her.”

  “That’s not fair,” Sam shot back, never letting go of her completely. “I didn’t know. I never would have rejected you or her.”

  Rosalyn melted again and fell into him. “I know,” she replied through a few more sobs, “but I wasn’t going to make you do that. You wouldn’t have been happy.”

  Sam felt the sting of her words. He recalled all the times she pushed him for more in their relationship. He’d thought she was just changing her mind at the time. It was aggravating, and he didn’t want to see things change when they were going so well. It had never dawned on him that she might be pregnant. He never would have reacted the way that he had if he’d known the truth. Seeing how he’d pushed her away made him feel sick to his stomach, but there wasn’t time for him to really react.

  “Why were you trying to take me away?” he asked, pulling away so he could look at her again.

  “What?” she asked in response, still thinking they were discussing the past.

  “Just now. Why did you say we had to leave?”

  Rosalyn did what she could to catch her breath and calm down.

  “I met my contact on the train,” she admitted. “He told me that I had to bring you to Boston and turn you over to them. What you and the gang have been doing has devastated them more than you know. Their men have lost confidence and even the Resistance is having more success since you started targeting the Empire directly.”

  “What are they going to do with me?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I get the feeling that they want to take you back over, which makes sense if we are meeting them in Boston. They just finished a
new station there and can send trains back to London out of the port now. They’ll probably kill you once you arrive.”

  “They want to cut the head off the gang,” a voice called out from behind Sam.

  It was General Adams.

  “I’m sorry I kept the truth from you Sam, but we needed your help to hit them while the wound was still fresh. If you’d known, you would have run off like you’re going to do now. I’d try and stop you, but I know better. Our deal will still stand for your men if they continue with us, but if you leave now, I cannot protect you.”

  “I know,” Sam replied. “Will you stop me?”

  The General looked down a moment and then back to Sam. “I will be forced to stop you,” he answered. “I would have to go and get my men together to make an arrest. You’d be arrested in no less than fifteen minutes.”

  The General’s meaning was crystal clear. Sam nodded to him with respect and appreciation and looked back to Boomer and Mac.

  “Hell no!” Boomer shouted. “We’re coming too. You can’t do this on your own!”

  Mac just nodded in agreement as Boomer ran off to get the others. Sam wanted to refuse, but he knew better.

  “Sam,” the General spoke again. “I do need to warn you not to steal one of our airships. I know that you’d be tempted to take the one over there since it has small craft which can land safely after launch. If you did that, I’d really have hell to pay from my superiors.”

  With that, the General checked his watch and turned away, walking back toward the command tent at a snail’s pace. Sam had never quite known what to make of him, but he was proving himself to be a man of integrity beyond anything Sam could have hoped for. Everyone jumped right into action. The rest of the gang came sprinting over to the airship and they unloaded all the supplies they could carry and hustled to the resistance craft that was just a few hundred paces away.

  “SHIT!” Sam screamed just as they began to close the doors.

  “What?” DaVinci asked from the controls.

  There was no cockpit in this smaller ship, just a single cabin with the controls at the front and four beds at the back. The additional two seats along with the beds meant there was room for everyone to sit, but it was cramped.

  “Grease and Navada are still coming,” Sam answered.

  “No time,” Davinci shouted, pulling a lever, which set off a loud hissing noise as the ship lifted off. “Point me in their direction and find a rope ladder. That’s our only chance to get them, but if we delay anymore here, they’ll stop us.”

  He was right, but Sam hated to risk leaving them behind. Grease would be devastated to learn that she’d missed them by minutes.

  Sam reached the front windows next to DaVinci just as the group on horseback arrived at the ridge off in the distance. DaVinci was already turning the ship their way. Sam prayed that the soldiers with them wouldn’t be a problem. As far as they still knew, Sam was in command. They wouldn’t know he’d stolen the craft and was deserting again.

  The ship was slower than their own, but they met the group halfway between the ridge and camp and DaVinci managed to slow them enough for Ben to shout down from the open door. The low flying airship had their attention already, and the whole group looked very perplexed by what was taking place. Without saying more than he could in front of the soldiers, Sam told Grease and Navada that they had to leave to complete the mission he’d learned about in the cabin. The two women looked at each other with a knowing glance before Navada shouted back up that she couldn’t come.

  “Why not?” Sam screamed back down.

  “I’m a Resistance soldier and my place is here. This is a mission for your gang. I will do what I can for you, but I can’t go with you.”

  There was no time to process all the feelings Sam had for both Rosalyn and Navada. He was sad to see Navada part ways, but at the same time, he was grateful to avoid the complication of having her on board. He already knew that his heart belonged to Rosalyn, but having to navigate having just slept with the other woman would have severely complicated his situation.

  They lowered the ladder for Grease, who paused a moment to say her farewell to Navada, before standing on the back of her horse and struggling to climb the dangling ladder. Every time she reached for the next rung, it looked like she was about to fall, and Sam quickly decided that they needed to pull her up. Sam grabbed a rung, and along with Boomer, Mac, and Ben, they heaved her all the way into the ship’s cabin.

  “GO! NOW!” Navada called up as the other soldiers looked toward the camp.

  The General must have raised the alert. One of the soldiers pieced it together and drew his sidearm, but not before they had closed the door and DaVinci was pushing it back into a rising forward momentum. The sound of two bullets bouncing off the door was all the resistance they heard as the soldiers likely thought better of risking bringing the whole ship down on top of themselves.

  A winded Sam filled Grease in on all that had transpired in the mere minutes he was in the camp as everyone either settled into their seats or on one of the beds for the long trip northeast. DaVinci cursed the ship many times when it reached its top speed for not being faster, but Rosalyn shared that they still had three days to get there, which was plenty of time. Now all they needed was a plan.

  Chapter 15

  Give Them What They Want

  As best they could all guess, General Clive planned to take Sam back to England on one of the newest trans-Atlantic routes. The plan had to be to take him back at the end of the fifth day which added up with the schedule they were able to get their hands on at a pit stop along the way. The train would leave just after sundown.

  Keeping Sam on shore any longer than was necessary was nothing more than an increased risk that someone would come for him. Having that level of confidence helped Sam plan his own rescue. DaVinci estimated that they could arrive just outside of Boston a day early which would give the rest of the gang time to prepare for yet another assault on a moving train.

  Rosalyn initially lost her cool at the plan to rescue Sam, fully believing that the British would take her daughter’s life for the failure. After talking it through, they all reasoned that the gang’s interference would not be taken as her own fault and that so long as she appeared to still be working as a double agent for the Empire, they’d want to keep Lizzy alive to maintain their leverage. Sam had another part to his plan, but he wanted to keep that under his hat for now. If Rosalyn found out, it would likely just complicate the matter.

  Never liking a plan that wasn’t vetted by at least one other, Sam shared his thoughts with his brother Ben. Ben clenched his fists at the idea, but there was nothing he could say that would change his mind. He bounced some challenges back and forth with Sam, but in the end, he agreed that it was the best option. He and Ben hadn’t had any time to talk with everything else going on. Ben had never been the one Sam spoke with the most, but their bond was unbreakable and Sam wasn’t more comfortable relying on anyone else.

  “You know who would get a kick out of all this, don’t you?” Ben asked.

  “Ralph,” Sam replied with a tired smile.

  “You bet. That guy never wanted anything more in life than to fly on an airship. I think he even said he wanted to try jumping out of one sometime with a canopy to sail down to Earth. If he could see us doing this crazy crap, he’d lose his mind.”

  Ralph had been a neighbor to the Rosecrans family when Sam and Ben were growing up. His wife had passed and he was a lonely man, but Sam’s folks adopted him into the family and he was as near an uncle to Sam as any of his father’s actual kin. Ralph taught Sam to shoot a pistol from a young age and was largely responsible for the skill he had with the weapon today. He’d followed his wife in death a short time before Ben entered the service.

  “You know he’d make DaVinci let him fly. I don’t know who’d win that fight,” Sam joked.

  Ben laughed too and replied, “I do. Ralph was a tough old goat. No offense to DaVinci, but he would
n’t stand a chance.”

  The two men were interrupted in the small office area at the rear of the little cabin. It was more a closet than an office, but Sam guessed the officers used it as the latter. Grease was at the door.

  “What are you two girls gabbing about?” she asked with a grin.

  “Nothing mom,” Ben joked, getting punched firmly in the shoulder for his jab.

  “You need to rest,” she said to Sam. “Rosalyn’s worried and she’s right. You haven’t slept since the cabin, and I can’t imagine that was much of a sleep for you after everything else we’d been through. Lay down and try and get some sleep or you’ll be useless by the time we get there.”

  Sam rolled his eyes and looked at Ben.

  “Don’t look at me,” Ben insisted, raising his hands in surrender. “She already hit me once, and I actually agree with her. You look like a dead man walking at the moment.”

  It seemed that everyone was in agreement and Sam figured they must be right when he realized he lacked the strength to even argue about it. He stood slowly and nodded his agreement as he made his way out into the small cabin. He climbed into on of the beds and Rosalyn came over and sat at the head of the bed and stroked his hair. Sam always loved to have his hair stroked. It was the most relaxing thing in the world, but the truth was, he knew that he’d be out the moment he closed his eyes, and he was.

  When he woke, the sun was up again and Rosalyn had squeezed into the bed beside him. It was incredible how fast everything had changed. She had gone from an unexpected guest to a traitor in one day, and then from a traitorous spy to the mother of his child just as quickly a few days later. The others had wanted to toss her off the ship less than forty-eight hours earlier and now they were shooting him knowing smiles and grins as they noticed him waking up next to her.

  “Welcome back,” Grease said. “You snore like a dying cow.”

  It was good to be with family.

  “We’ll be arriving in a few hours,” DaVinci called from the controls. I don’t know the exact time. Only Ticks would have known that.”