Strike

by Jim Heskett

  “Password means it’s like a door with a lock,” he said. “I do remember that.”

  On the desk was a keyboard, and he stared at the letters and numbers. No way could they guess a password.

  Rosia must have come to this same conclusion because she wandered to the next computer and tapped on the screen again. The same prompt to enter a password. She woke every screen in the aisle, and at the last one, a different message appeared:

  Enter command

  “This one isn’t locked,” she said. “Do you know what to do?”

  He wracked his brain, trying to remember how he interacted with these things when he was young. Bits and pieces floated around in his head. Mostly, he remembered how he wanted to ignore the computers and play with toys, but the teachers made them learn how to type and what words to use to make the computers do different things.

  He focused on the words. Random commands surfaced in his head. After closing his eyes, a few words became clear. He reached down and typed menu, then hit the enter key.

  The screen changed to a series of commands. One of them read tunnel configuration.

  “Tunnel configuration?” he said. “Do you think it’s referring to the tunnels under the mansion?”

  “Yes, I do. So they can change the tunnel layout. But why?”

  Yorick didn’t have a chance to answer the question. A sound came from outside the door. The shuffling of footsteps. He and Rosia barely had time to share a look before the door opened, and in walked a guard, unarmed, with a bored look on his face. But, when his eyes landed on the two teenaged intruders, his expression changed. He yelped and fumbled for a device on his belt.

  It didn’t take Yorick more than a second to realize it was a communicator. He would warn others about them.

  No time to think. Had to act.

  Yorick leaped across the desk in front of him, headed straight for the guard. He was still trying to get a handle on the communicator device, turning it around in his hands. The guard’s eyes flicked back and forth between the oncoming Yorick and the device.

  If he sent a message, they would all be dead. The plantación would lock down. The farm workers would revolt now as an impulsive reaction, and the king’s soldados would clamp down and retaliate. Everything would be over. All dead.

  Yorick changed course when he noted the guard was standing less than a meter from the robot. He ran straight at it. Lowered his shoulder. And at the last second, grunting and gritting his teeth, he launched.

  Yorick smashed into the side of the robot, using everything he had in him. The thing tipped from its pedestal, screeching as the metal feet slid a centimeter along the base. Then it fell. It crashed down, pinning the guard underneath it. A tremendous roar accompanied the crash as metal and flesh merged on the floor.

  Blood everywhere. The communicator fell from the guard’s hand as his eyes fluttered. For a few seconds, he tried to draw a breath, but Yorick could see the machine had crushed his chest. He couldn’t expand it. The guard relaxed as the last breath escaped his lips.

  Dead.

  Yorick’s brain buzzed, his heart pounded in his chest. Adrenaline spiked, making his eyes bug out of his skull. He lost himself, momentarily forgetting where he was. “What happened?”

  “We have to go,” Rosia said. “Back into the tunnel.”

  They stepped over the body and sprinted down the hall, back toward the door they’d opened. The reality of the situation began to settle as the adrenaline faded. Yorick hadn’t thought. He’d gone into some blank state of motion. Pure action, no consideration. And he’d killed someone.

  They were no closer to finding Tenney, and no closer to understanding this place. And now, with a dead guard in their wake.

  1 Jefe: boss

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  At the lip of the cellar door, Yorick paused, panting. Rosia followed a second later. They’d run almost the entire way here, with Yorick barking out the turns as best he could remember them. They’d gone down the wrong hall only once and had to double back. But, on the way, no guards were flooding the tunnels. No alarms and no lights flashing in their faces.

  Maybe no one had heard the crashing of the robot onto the floor. Maybe that classroom basement area was shielded somehow by sound. Thick walls.

  Yorick kept seeing the guard’s face, the moment before the robot had hit him, falling to the ground. The panic that had been written in the man’s eyes. But Yorick kept telling himself that it had to be done. They would have been caught and killed, and many more would have died.

  He barely remembered doing it. But, it had to be done. Yorick had taken a life. A real life, not like in a battle round. Dead. That guard would never again draw another breath.

  They emerged into the warehouse to find nothing out of the ordinary. The spotlight from high up on the wall swept through, casting a yellow light through the upper windows of the warehouse. But no voices. No commotion.

  When they slipped outside, they only had to wait for a single minute until one lone guard made a rotation past the warehouse quadrant.

  And they sprinted all the way back to the dorms. Eyes forward, paying no attention to any distractions.

  Yorick opened the front door to the ground floor of the dorms, amazed there were no guards there with weapons pointed at his face. Just the same lobby with elevators and announcement mail slots and area rugs. Calming music coming from unseen speakers.

  Had he actually killed someone? Had that happened?

  When he could breathe again, he whispered to Rosia, “What is happening? Why are we free right now?”

  “Only the stars know,” Rosia said. “Because of the Royal Army, somehow?”

  That explanation made sense. With the king’s men here, everyone was in a state of confusion. Wybert’s plan to reign them all in had created the opposite effect.

  Rosia leaned up against a nearby wall and caught her breath. “We need to find Malina and tell her about Tenney.”

  They walked to the elevators and boarded. Rosia tapped the button to reach one of the farm worker floors. Guerreros weren’t technically allowed there, but that seemed to be the least of their problems.

  In the quiet of the elevator, as it hurtled through space, Yorick was finally able to be alone with his thoughts.

  He’d killed one of Lord Wybert’s guards, with the soldados inside the plantación walls. Under the most intense period of scrutiny ever. Not that killing a guard was a good idea at any other time. Yorick had never even heard of someone attacking a guard and getting away with it, let alone killing one.

  There would be retribution, unlike anything they’d ever seen. Wybert would lose his mind.

  When the elevator door opened, none other than Malina herself was standing there, in the hall. Hands clasped in front of her chest, her shoulders heaving up and down. Her angular face tilted, eyes cast at the floor. She looked like a flower poised to lose its petals.

  “Where have you been?” she said, finally looking up. “I’ve been searching everywhere for you.”

  “I, uh,” Yorick said, and then Malina checked left and right before jumping into the elevator. She drew a key from her pocket and inserted it into a lock on the elevator button panel. A green light flashed, and she pressed the B2 button. No one had ever been to B2 before.

  “What’s going on?” Rosia said. “How do you have an elevator key?”

  “I’ll explain everything when we get there,” Malina said. She was vibrating, shaking all over.

  The elevator sank like a stone. None of them said anything for the four or five seconds the trip lasted until they reached the sub-basement level of the dorms.

  The door whooshed open into a floor Yorick had never seen before. He could feel a sharp cold in this subterranean level. But, unlike the strange computer room in the mansion, there wasn’t anything exciting or mysterious here. Just shelves and mops and brooms and stacks upon stacks of toilet paper.

  “It’s us,” Malina said. “I brought them.”

/>   From around a shelf deeper in the room, Tenney emerged.

  “What are you doing here?” Yorick said. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  Malina winced. “I’m sorry. I only found him a few minutes ago.”

  Now, Yorick noted the bandage on Tenney’s side and the way he limped as he crossed the room toward them.

  “What happened?” Rosia said.

  Tenney leaned against a shelf, grimacing. “I broke into the guard storage building. Stole some weapons and ammunition. Real bullets, not the play ones you use on the battlefield.”

  “How in the stars did you pull that off?” Yorick said.

  Tenney pointed at the wound on his side. “Not well, obviously.”

  “But that’s how you got the key,” Yorick said to Malina. She nodded.

  “That’s not all we got,” Tenney said. “We learned something. Your rifles are coded to only allow the magazines with the rubber bullets. And to only fire them at other guerreros who are wearing suits with chips, right?”

  Yorick shrugged. “Yeah, we think so. That’s how it’s always worked during the battles.”

  Tenney held out his arm and pointed to his elbow. “Imagine this is your rifle. If you remove the magazine, there is a space deep inside it. A slot that will accept a small input.”

  “Input?” Yorick asked, tilting his head.

  Rosia gasped. “We can insert the chips into the rifles.”

  “Yes,” Tenney said, nodding. “And they can then use magazines with real bullets. There are crates of these real bullets now hidden in a back room of the northwest warehouse on the battlefield.”

  Yorick frowned. “Why are you bleeding?”

  “All this info didn’t come for free,” Tenney said, with a sour smile. “Malina told you she was friendly with a guard. Now that guard is dead, plus one more. Their bodies are hidden inside the basement of the cafeteria, but they’ll be found by morning. Maybe even earlier, if we’re unlucky.”

  Yorick wanted to criticize the farm serf for doing something so bold and stupid, but it’s not as if he had any reason to claim innocence. All of these deaths would amount to one thing: a total and complete clamping down by Wybert and the king’s soldados. If Wybert brought in the Royal Army because of Diego’s rumor about spying, what would he do now?

  Probably kill them all.

  “This is bad,” Rosia said. “We also had our own complication in the mansion, when we were looking for you.”

  “Sorry about that,” the farm worker said. “I didn’t know you were going to send out a search party.” He cast sorrowful eyes at Malina. “I didn’t mean to worry everyone so much.”

  “It’s okay,” Rosia said. “We’re glad you’re safe.”

  “Sounds like we’ve all done things we can’t take back.”

  “So what happens now?” Yorick asked.

  “The war starts tomorrow,” Tenney said, his face set. “We will place some weapons for you in the warehouse. And we’re going to break into the Q room to get more.” His jaw tensed. He looked like a much older man, not the young and vibrant person he’d seemed in these last few days since they had come to know him.

  “Impossible,” Yorick said. “We haven’t even spoken to anyone on our team. We can’t spring this on them with no warning.”

  Not to mention the fact that even with real bullets, they were still out-manned and out-gunned. This was pure insanity.

  Tenney cleared his throat and sneaked a glimpse at the bandage over his side. “You’ll have to find some way to make it work. One way or another, this ends tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Rosia paced back and forth as Yorick sat on the bed in their room, staring at his hands. Two full hours had passed since the commotion in the tunnels and their harried escape. He still couldn’t believe the guards had not leveled their door and thrown them to the ground.

  “Why are we not being taken away?” he said. “Why are there not alarms going off all around the plantación? I’d expect Wybert to be all over the place. There are three guards dead. Nothing like this has ever happened before, as far back as I can remember.”

  Rosia chewed on her fingernails as she paced. “No, it makes sense. They don’t know about the two Tenney killed. It’s late, and I’ll bet the guards don’t have a curfew. They can come and go as they please so they won’t be missed until morning, when they’re not at their assignments. Maybe not even then. Maybe no one will care about them for days or even weeks. I have no idea how well they’re tracked.”

  “And the one we killed under the mansion?”

  Rosia gave him a quick look, as if to say, the one you killed in the mansion, not me. Or, maybe Yorick had imagined that look. He didn’t trust himself to read people right now. The last few hours had felt like a dream.

  But, she said, “Think about it. That room is something secret. Maybe they rarely go down there. I mean, there was only one guard. No one came rushing after us when that giant robot crashed to the floor, and it was loud. Very loud. We spent twenty minutes trying to find our way out of there. That means he was alone on the floor, with no one nearby to back him up or come to his aid. It’s a private area.”

  A light bulb flashed in Yorick’s head. “The computers. Wybert said they’d all been destroyed, years before. He was obviously lying about that, so they’re important. He’s keeping them secret in the mansion.”

  “Wybert doesn’t want anyone to know he has them. Probably that robot, too.”

  “Why does he have secret computers? What does it have to do with switching the tunnels? Are they related?”

  Rosia shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.”

  Yorick took a few breaths to calm his thumping heart. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because soon, maybe sometime tonight or early tomorrow, the guards Tenney killed are going to become public knowledge. Then we’re in trouble. With the Royal Army here, they’re going to line us all up and kill us, one by one.”

  Rosia paused before answering. “We should go to the battlefield tonight and get the real ammunition from the warehouse. Or we could break into the Quartermaster’s storage and take guns from there.”

  “No,” Yorick said. “Not without our team. If we start a war with just the two of us, how long do you think that will last?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We have to talk to our guerreros first. Make sure they’re all with us. It makes more sense to wait until we’re all armed, then show everyone how to insert the chips into the rifles.”

  Rosia bit her lip. “But doesn’t waiting put them in danger?”

  “I think it’s less dangerous for them. If we’re discovered right now, they don’t know much. Paulo knows a little, but not even he knows everything we’ve been doing.”

  “Okay, you’re right. But all this is assuming Lord Wybert lets us even have a battle tomorrow and doesn’t shoot every single guerrero the moment we show our faces.”

  Yorick shrugged. “Yeah, well, there is that possibility. Plus, we don’t know when Tenney and his field serfs are going to show up. That complicates things.”

  She leaned against the window, placing her hands on the glass. Breath fogging the surface in front of her. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We do all our morning routine as normal. As soon as the battle starts, we collect everyone and head for the warehouse with the munitions. Get the real bullets Tenney stashed there. Then, we’re ready and we’re together as one unit, no matter what happens. Tenney can bring his people whenever he sees fit.”

  “We could use support from the Reds, too. I mean, they oppose us on the field, but they don’t deserve to die. Not for real. With the guards and the army watching over us, we have a common enemy.”

  She joined him on the bed. “They should have made you the leader of the team.”

  “Not a chance. You’re the best possible option. You can be a little hot-headed, but no one knows how to make battle decisions like you can.”

 
; “Hot-headed, huh?”

  He forced a smile. “I actually like that about you. It’s sexy.”

  Rosia didn’t seem to be in a flirty mood. She pointed a finger at his chest. “Convincing the Reds will be your job. Managing people is not exactly my strongest trait.”

  “I know,” he said, smiling, “but I love you, anyway.”

  She planted a kiss on his cheek. “Tomorrow, we’re going to change all of this.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The sun rose above the wall of the plantación to the east, casting rays of sunlight on the faces of the group of Blues. Kids, mostly, with a few in their twenties. Not one of them older than twenty-five. Rosia couldn’t fathom how such heavy burdens had been placed on the shoulders of a bunch of young people. She herself not even past her second decade on this planet.

  She knew why Wybert liked them all so young, of course. So he could control them. So he could terrify them. Snatch them as children, educate them to learn only what he wanted them to know. And find easy ways to get rid of them, so there was always a fresh crop of young ones to take the places of the expired.

  When she finished talking to the nineteen other guerreros huddled in a circle in front of the dorms, she tried to read their faces. The youngest ones seemed the most scared. The older ones, those who had been here for a decade or longer, showed fear, but also resolve. That didn’t surprise her at all. A decade of abuse had fueled their simmering anger and desire for revenge.

  Now, they had a path. A way to make actual change, no matter how flimsy it seemed.

  “I know what you’ve heard is shocking,” she said. “Some of you knew more about the situation than others. But what matters now is that our course is set. It’s not possible to turn off the spigot and go back to the way things were. And so, we have to make the best of it and win out the day.”