The drone was so close by now that they couldn’t miss it, even with its color shifting. Sun li could now see that it had two elongated ovals on the ends of its wings and the two of these flashed briefly.
Brit tensed up when he saw the light and banged on the hood again. “There’s a drone headed our way,” he yelled. “And it’s charging up its pulsers.”
Whether Osh had finished checking his systems or because of Brit’s words, the ship lurched forward, swerving so that it was no longer in the path of the drone.
The drone corrected its path to follow theirs.
“That’s impossible,” Brit said under his breath.
It was almost on top of them now, flying so low that Sun li could see the seamless gray metal it was made out of for the first time.
“There’s no way they could know we were coming,” Brit added, a hollow look in his eyes.
“What can we do?” Sun li wondered, realizing they would not be able to outrun it or avoid it in the slower hover.
“I don’t know,” Brit stated, his voice devoid of emotion. His lips were twitching more than they ever had before.
“Can’t you think of something?” she screamed. “You’re a jammer aren’t you?”
But Sun li could tell from the look on his face that he was just as helpless as she was. She was just about to risk a leap from the hover when a blazing streak of blue light hurtled across the horizon, slicing into the drone. The machine dissolved instantaneously. A thousand tiny shards cascaded towards the ground and just like that it was gone.
Brit stared up at the cloud of debris as they sped away from it. “If someone knows about our mission the chances of succeeding will be drastically reduced.”
“But who shot it down?” Sun li asked, nervously fingering her vambraces and then catching herself and silently cursing her inability to break the habit.
Brit scratched the stubble under his chin like he’d developed a sudden rash. “The blast was from a disruptor cannon and those are pretty short range. The means the shot had to come from a Delegation outpost. But that makes no sense. Why would they fire on their own drone?”
Sun li sighed and sank back down into the bed of the hover, an anxious shiver running through her body. Though the hover sped on towards Silenia, she could not keep her mind off the drone or her eyes off the sky. She had not expected any trouble while still inside Delegation territory. And the fact that Brit seemed to be just as shocked and frightened by the drone’s appearance as she was made her realize that she was in farther over her head than she had thought.
CHAPTER FOUR
Silenia
The hover barge broke down two more times before they reached Silenia but they did not spot any more drones.
For Sun li, the visit to the city was a bit of a disappointment. She knew it was just a job and that they weren’t there to take in the sights, but it was the first time she had ever been there and she had hoped at least to see the Charred Market, one of the last remaining above ground markets in the border territory of Tredici. Most of the markets had gone underground since no one could buy from them during the frequent lockdowns, but the Charred Market stood as a testament to the defiant will of the people of Silenia to continue on with life as if the whole world were not crumbling down around them.
Unlike the acrecian stone buildings of Bracken and other cities within Delegation territory, most of the buildings in Silenia were built with char, a cheap rock-like paste easily crafted from materials gleaned in the nearby mines in the Chenthian hills. Because of this and because they were either unwilling or unable to afford to move their market underground, the market was said to be constantly falling apart from the endyne rains and being rebuilt again on an almost daily basis.
Unfortunately they only passed through the outskirts of Silenia so all Sun li got to see were masses of people wandering amongst large piles of trash or riding in other dilapidated hover barges like their own.
Their ship coasted towards a string of shacks hawking bone loaf, tripe powder, oil pasties and other foodstuffs. Two large heaps of trash bracketed the line of shops like rotting sentinels and clouds of flies and other insects sprinkled the area.
Their hover jerked to a stop out in front of one of the food stalls and Osh’s grinning face emerged from an opening in the cockpit.
“This is your destination,” he informed them.
Sun li leapt from the back of the hover. She wasn’t all that thrilled about their ‘destination’ but she was anxious for the chance to stretch her legs.
Brit slid out of the hover after her and placed a large twenty weight shard in the pilot’s hand. “We were never here,” he told the man.
“Right,” Osh nodded, slipping the shards in a vest pocket nonchalantly. Then the ex-soldier popped back in his rig and the vehicle surged forward, leaving them alone in the midst of the scattered crowd milling about the shacks.
“We’d better load up on provisions for the march across the Scrape,” Brit told her, strolling towards a nearby shop. “Any preference?”
“Yes,” Sun li nodded. “I prefer we don’t eat anything from these shops. The whole place looks infested.”
Brit chuckled. “Somehow I knew you’d say that,” he replied. “But since we don’t have time to look around, I’d say this jaunt cream shop will have to do.”
Sun li had never tried jaunt cream before but she had heard of it. It was reportedly popular with jammers, augers, and other people who had no qualms about using whatever drugs or technology were available to augment their performance or natural abilities. Normally she would have never considered using such a substance. It was against the Code, since blades were supposed to keep themselves physically pure. But Sun li had always felt that her father’s interpretation of that particular section of Kamido was a bit of a reach. She knew other blades augmented from time to time but out of deference to her father, she had never employed such methods. However, she didn’t see how she really had much choice in this instance. Based on what Brit had told her, it would be two days until they reached the Factor Ten base and then of course two days back and there would be no stopping for sleep or extended rest in between. She had once gone three days without sleep and it had taken her almost a ten span to recover. That had been a miserable experience and she was not anxious to test her limits again.
The shop Brit chose offered three varieties of the gooey concoction known as jaunt cream, but Sun li had never heard of the flavors of milt, jagger, or hynd so she let him choose. In the end he got a dozen tubes of each and paid the vendor with a handful of shards.
“That should be enough to get us there and back,” Brit remarked, loading up two satchels with the yellowish tubes and handing one to Sun li.
“Or give us food poisoning,” Sun li commented. “Are we heading out tonight?” The orb of Kess was low on the horizon and the chill of the dark would come quickly. It was extremely dangerous to travel at night as the temperatures almost always dropped below freezing, but Sun li had no doubt as to what his answer would be.
“Yes,” Brit replied. “And we’d better get out of Silenia before the orb falls. That’s when curfew begins and it will be much harder to leave after that.”
They followed the main thoroughfare towards the edge of town. Most of the traffic was headed in the opposite direction, but a few folks and hovers went with them. There were a handful of towns scattered between Silenia and the border, but Brit had said that it would be too dangerous to pass through them; there was no telling how many spies Factor Ten had scattered about this close to the frontier and even if they did stay clear of Ten’s agents there was no telling how many cutthroats and grifters in the outlying settlements might try and take advantage of two solitary travelers. So, as they left Silenia and its steaming trash heaps behind, they turned off the road and headed out cross country.
Sun li felt a fluttering in her stomach at the thought of setting foot in the flatlands beyond the border. Up to that point she had been so focused on
her father that she hadn’t stopped to ponder what such a visit might be like.
Though Factor Ten and the rest of the world now referred to those lands as merely the Scrape, she knew them by another name: Chay, the land of her birth. She had overheard her father and mother talk of it often when her mother was still alive, but after her death, her father had spoken of it less and less. Sun li stopped asking about it around that time because of the sadness it brought to her father’s eyes when she did. Occasionally she would hear the name mentioned in passing in the market, but even then it was spoken of in low tones as if the person were talking about someone who had taken ill or died.
And now she was being called back to the homeland she did not know, on a mission to infiltrate one of the outposts of Factor Ten, the same organization responsible for the destruction of Chay during what had come to be known as the Purge. If her father had spoken little of their homeland, he had told her even less about the Purge. All he had said was that Factor Ten had decided to destroy their lands and their people, but to this day, no one really knew why.
But even though her homeland no longer existed, even though it lay covered in scars and sorrow, she knew that the memory of it still lived on in the heart of her father, and she wondered what he would think if he knew where she was headed.
* * *
They reached the edge of the Scrape in the middle of the night. The heat began dwindling mercifully at last. Both Ungent the lesser moon and Kalith the greater were near full so there was plenty of light to see the dramatic change in the terrain.
Once the borderlands of Chay had been an extension of the Chenthian Hills, though according to her father they had been rockier. Amidst the rocks, however, had grown fields of tinegrass, a translucent orange tuber. Sun li’s father had a few pots of it growing in his shop back in Bracken and he used it for his most special and rare teas. It was the one bit of their homeland which he had managed to bring with him.
She stood on the border to her past, where the swelling hills of Chenth had been lopped off abruptly before a field of rubble that stretched off on either side as far as she could see. Beyond the rocky mounds was the flattest, most featureless landscape Sun li had ever seen. The ground was made of smooth rock that was uniformly gray. Not only was it devoid of a single rise or fall, but it looked completely devoid of any signs of life. For all she could tell, it might have been the end of the world. That was the only thing that came to mind when she looked out across it.
“Why pluck the fruit from the tree if you do not intend to eat it?” Sun li wondered aloud, quoting one of her father’s sayings, a piece of Chayan wisdom which seemed appropriate in light of what Factor Ten had done. For as far as she knew they had never taken over the lands they had destroyed, but had left them abandoned all these years.
“You’re talking about Chay, aren’t you?” Brit observed. “The Purge was a long time ago.”
“Not for some of us,” Sun li replied.
He shook his head. “Emotions decrease the probability for success. Get over it and let’s move on.”
She darted an angry look at him, but he acted like he didn’t notice and started towards the rubble. As she struggled to hold her tongue, watching his scrawny figure clamber through the rocks, she realized that her anger was wasted on someone like him. He had no home, no family, no purpose in life. His kind only lived for the next experience, the next pleasure, the next victory. He was little better than the beasts that had once roamed the lands of Chay, though they at least could be tamed and made useful. But even if he did not remember that he was a man, Sun li knew. And she had given her word to protect this man. And, whether she liked him or not, she intended to fulfill her pledge.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Torrid Pace
For someone with such short legs, Brit was able to keep a surprising pace once they cleared the rocks. The flattened landscape offered no resistance to their intrusion, but neither did it afford any welcome. It simply stretched on and on in mindless indifference.
As Brit had promised, there was no sign of Factor Ten forces, at least at first. The night came on swiftly and with it a bitter cold that made Sun li’s fingers and toes go numb. They downed a few squirts of the jaunt cream as they ran. Not only did this take the edge off the chill, it gave her a renewed burst of energy which lasted well past sunrise. But apart from its powerful effects, it tasted like rubberized dirt and she almost gagged on it at first. It caused a strange buzzing sensation in her as well, tickling down her throat like she had just swallowed one of her little brother’s vibrating marbles. She took note of the label, “jagger”, and resolved not to try that flavor again until she ran out of the others.
Shortly after the orb had risen and the two moons faded, they saw what looked like two drones off in the distance, but they flew off in another direction, leaving the purple Kessian skies otherwise clear.
About midday they came across the first novelty of their journey, a small arrangement of depressions in the ground which broke the unending flatness. There must have been at least half a dozen of them, all scattered about in the same general area. Brit ran right by them, but Sun li stopped at the edge and looked down. The sides of the pit were covered in metal panelling and the floor, though mostly covered in debris, was also made of metal. There were no doors or windows leading out of it, but there was a thin rock wall, also with metal panelling, dividing the chamber in two. It looked like it had been some sort of room at one point.
“Wait.” Sun li motioned for Brit to stop. “What is this place?”
Brit halted on the far side of the depressions. “It’s no concern of ours. Come on, we’ve got to keep going.” He turned as if he meant to start running again.
But Sun li decided not to follow. It was almost time for a break anyway. She could feel the jaunt cream starting to fade.
“These were buildings,” she observed. “But I thought the Purge erased everything from the land—hills, buildings, people. Nothing was left.”
Brit put his hands on his hips and gave her a testy look before wandering back towards her, pulling out a tube of cream as he went.
“The locus beam only went down so far,” he said. “These rooms might have been beyond its reach, a second level basement perhaps.”
Now that he said that, it did seem as though the walls weren’t very tall. If these rooms had once been underground, the beam might have only taken out the top half. That might explain why she had heard rumors of some Chayans surviving even from the central highlands where the Purge had initiated.
In her mind, she tried to imagine a beam of energy that had stretched the entire thousand mile length of Chay but it seemed impossible to fathom. And yet the results were plain enough to see.
“Listen, whatever these rooms were, we’ve got to keep going. The longer we’re out here, the more chance we give the Factor Ten drones to spot us,” Brit warned, “Let’s go.”
Sun li glanced at the abandoned room one last time before heading off after him. She knew that they were too far into the Scrape for these rooms to have belonged to her village, but somehow seeing them brought home the reality that she was actually in Chay. She could see her little brother and sister sleeping in cots down inside those holes before the ceilings had been ripped away and the walls chopped in half. She imagined her father resting in the room beside them, whole and healthy and at peace.
Brit, no longer willing to wait for her, took off running again across the Scrape. Turning aside from the shelled out building, she rushed to catch up with him.
As they ran her foot prints pounded the smooth black ground. Instead of leaving imprints they only left little puffs of dust which disappeared a moment later leaving no trace of their passing.
Sun li, realizing that her strength was waning, reached into her satchel and pulled out another tube of the cream. She glanced down at the label first to make sure it wasn’t jagger. Thankfully this one was labeled “milt”. But when she squirted it into her mouth she found the tast
e was just as awful. In fact, she could not tell any difference whatsoever between them and wondered if the labels meant anything at all. She hoped the next variety she tried would not be as terrible as the first two.
In the capital city of the Delegation, Nilar, it was said that scientists had developed a way of absorbing nourishment into your system without eating, thus bypassing the ability to taste one’s food. Sun li had thought that it sounded like an awful invention the first time she heard of it. But after partaking of the nauseous jaunt cream she began to wonder whether or not such a development had its place. She certainly would have gladly accepted some of this new type of sustenance over the awful cream.
She wiped her mouth and continued across the barren plain. They maintained the same grueling pace all through the day and did not let up as night descended once again upon the land.
It was well past midnight when the lights began to glare off to the north. There was already plenty of illumination provided by the two moons, but these new bursts made it seem like the day was coming once again out on the edge of the horizon. The lights bloomed across the sky like fuzzy reflections of the moons multiplied a hundred times over but blue instead of red. They were quiet and hauntingly beautiful, but their sudden appearance made Sun li uneasy.
“Those are locus pulses. The Delegation must have begun their offensive,” Brit observed between breaths. “Let’s just hope they don’t push forward fast enough to overtake us.”
Sun li had never seen pulses that large before, though she had heard that the military class cannons could take out several city blocks with a single blast.
Both of the travelers had grown weary by then so they downed another few doses of cream and pushed on. Sun li tried the hynd this time and it was just as horrible as the others, though in a different way at least. It felt like wet charcoal sliding down the back of her throat and once again she had to resist the urge to gag it back up.
The Jammer and the Blade Page 3
