“Movement in the trees. Five o’ clock,” warned Sybutu. “It’s… the Muryani. It’s Enthree.”
“Finally,” said Fitz with feeling. “The team is reunite…ted… Oh, bollocks!”
As she drew clear of the trees, it became clear that Enthree was on her own. And the way she waved one of her forelimbs at them looked frantic.
“Take cover behind the mechs,” Sybutu shouted. “Prepare to give covering fire.”
Rounded black fuselages nosed out of the trees, red crosses painted on the tips. Hover fliers. GAC-19s.
“Let’s give them a hot welcome,” said Sybutu.
“No,” said Fitz. “At this range, you won’t penetrate their armor. Hold your fire. Give their imagination a chance to ponder why there are two wrecked mechs here, and what was powerful enough to take them out.”
“Do you recognize the markings?” Bronze asked.
“REEDs,” said Fitz. “Re-Education Enforcement Division. Swept through the woods from A-10. They were waiting for us in force. Knew we were coming. But they didn’t know about the mechs. Watch…”
The GAC-19s eased back into the forest, never having fully emerged. Bronze didn’t blame them. The entire area was covered in a thick layer of ash except the ruined metal of the mecha carcasses. Which meant the enormous metal machines had only recently been destroyed, and whatever had done that could still be around, waiting for the fliers to leave the cover of the trees.
“They’ve captured the others,” Enthree cried, as she drew close.
“Keep running!” Fitz shouted at the Muryani.
Enthree did exactly that, easily bounding over one of the Hunters in a single leap and continuing in the direction of the village.
“We run too,” Fitz said. “Don’t look back.”
——
They escaped through the village and then deep into the trees. They detected no signs of pursuit. Enthree reported that her party had been surprised by six of the GAC-19s without infantry support, and offered the opinion that they had encountered the limit of the REED pursuit for the moment.
“If they can march some prisoners back to base,” said Sybutu, “that’s an easier mission conclusion then making an attack on the village against unknown forces.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Fitz asked.
“No. We hadn’t yet retrieved the weapons that Ren Kay made us abandon. Vetch, Darant, and Lily are at their mercy. We must save my comrades.”
Fitz put a hand to her face and stroked a mandible. “They’re our comrades too, Ms. Enthree. And the boss ordered us to get the team together and that’s precisely what we shall do.”
“Thank you. And please, Captain Fitz, to clarify, the boss is Kanha Wei?”
Fitz grinned. “I’m glad someone has been paying attention. Now, Enthree, I’ve had the pleasure of hitching a ride when you were climbing over the buildings of Bresca-Brevae like you were wearing a rocket pack. Am I right that dense forest is like a highway to you?”
“I travel faster through the branches than across open ground.”
“Good. Follow our captured friends. Observe without being observed. Assess. Then return safely to us. We’ll be at the rendezvous point at the caves near Shinala Parva. If my guess is correct, that’s where I’ll find Commander Slinh, and I think I speak for all of us when I say I’d like to have a few stern words with her.”
Enthree nodded. She raced up the nearest tree and disappeared within seconds.
“As for the rest of us, we need allies to get our comrades back, and that means the Revolutionary Forces of Reconciliation. My father raised me never to strike old ladies with glasses, or Gliesans. Commander Slinh is both. But in the case of the hollow-boned treacherous ass, I intend to make an exception.”
“Are you serious?” said Sybutu. “You’re going to punch out the leader of the revolution?”
“Damned right I am. This revolution is a shambles. The only solution is for me to lead it myself.”
Sybutu growled. “I hate it when you make me sound like the damned voice of reason, but if you go up to the leader of the military forces in this zone and punch her out, won’t the rebels shoot you?”
“We’ll never learn the answer to that if we stand around yapping, will we, Sergeant? Come on, everybody. Time to beat feet.”
SASMITA AELIKAUR
The day had seemed a triumph on so many levels. Major Sasmita Aelikaur had led the Enforcement Division’s elite unit, Strike Force Purity, in the counterattack against the rebels and driven them from the A-10 facility.
The damned Militia were forever mocking her enforcers. They called them prison guard brutes who hid behind faceless masks, not real soldiers. Ironic, because that’s pretty much how the Legion poured scorn on the Militia.
But she’d proved them wrong today. Strike Force Purity had fought a battle without Militia aid. And they’d won convincingly.
And yet…
Her forces were still winning, of course. She’d driven her enforcers on relentlessly in their pursuit, never allowing the enemy respite.
Now, as dusk closed in, she was about to converse with the Revered Leader herself on a direct line to the capital.
It should be the ultimate personal triumph.
And yet…
The rebel attack had collapsed moments before she launched her counterattack. Why?
And whatever the reason for the Revered Leader’s call, it surely wasn’t to praise the conduct of her enforcers.
No, Aelikaur and her strike force were too obscure for that. In’Nalla was only interested in the sickening scenes around her in the ruins of Krunacao, a scene repeated in every settlement within twenty miles, though Krunacao was the largest.
Her wrist slate buzzed an alert. Incoming call.
Aelikaur checked the angle of her beret, took a deep breath, and tapped Accept.
The Revered Leader’s face regarded her through the slate’s surface. Her features were pinched as if pained by the burden of steering an entire world to a more enlightened society, freed of its bigotry and willful blindness to its own corruptive elements. To her relief, In’Nalla didn’t seem as angry as Aelikaur expected.
“I have seen online footage of so-called RevRec insurgents invading Krunacao and firing indiscriminately.” The Revered Leader leaned into the camera. It felt like she was opening up Aelikaur’s soul. “The implication is that this was an act of inter-factional fighting. However, I want you to forget what’s being claimed online for the moment. You’re my eyes and ears on the ground, Major. Tell me what happened there. What did your enforcers actually see?”
“Bodies everywhere, ma’am. The entire village slaughtered, its buildings burned. But it looks like the civilians fought back, because there are three war mechs here that were destroyed in the attack. They’re enormous machines. We’re trying to establish precisely what they are and how they got here. We have a suspect too. A patrol group spotted the counter-progress leader known as the Trucker. I think he’s a populist responsible for further degrading the morals of the willfully cancerous dissenters until they’re now capable of…” Words temporarily failing her, Aelikaur tilted her wrist outward and panned the slate across the scene of slaughter.
“Major,” barked the Revered Leader. “Complete your report.”
“Forgive me, ma’am. Our forensic teams are en route and will supply further information. So will the prisoners we captured. They’re Militia deserters from the capital. Our interrogators are readying to pry their secrets from them.”
“Tell your interrogators to stand down. I want the public to see their trials and confessions, but they are not to learn of the prisoners’ account. Anything they have to say at the moment would be given too much weight of significance and risks becoming unsanctioned news. They’re not even WCDs. They’re nothing more than gutter-scum deserters, so will know nothing of importance. I repeat, they are not to be interrogated. Not even questioned.”
“I understand, ma’am. They are not to be questio
ned.”
But Aelikaur didn’t understand. Surely the captives knew something of value. Unproblematic people had a powerful instinct to immediately publicize anything related to a suspected misdeed, but there were special interrogators who could be trusted to break society’s strongest taboos in defense of righteous authority. They knew how to keep a secret. How could she make In’Nalla see that without appearing to contradict the Revered Leader?
“The villagers, ma’am. They were known to harbor WCD insurrectionists, but this… this bloodbath was not the way to re-educate them. After being forced to confront the inappropriateness of their thoughts, they could have been rehabilitated as Class-3 citizens and led inoffensive lives. This was mass murder! A barbaric act.”
“Calm down!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am but you can’t see what I do. You can’t smell the scorched bodies. The rebels have to pay for this massacre.”
“I can assure you, they will, Major. To that end, you are to secure the site. Take footage but leave the scene undisturbed. I will have one of my professional teams there at first light to capture the brutality of this terrorist outrage, and make sure the correct messages are clearly presented to the public. The people must know that acts such as the Krunacao Massacre are the only alternative to following my way. And when we have made them understand, they will rise up in my name and wipe out the irredeemable WCDs who stand in the way of a just and unproblematic society. It will be a brutal bloodletting, but you understand how necessary this is.”
“After Krunacao… I do now, ma’am. You can rely on me.” The REED major looked around at the devastation. Tears began to stream down her cheeks. It was such a wicked waste of life. And wickedness must always be confronted with force.
“We have to purge this world for its own good, ma’am. It’s the only way.”
NEXT ISSUE: Deep Cover Revenge!
ISSUE 8
GETHREN WEN
Gethren Wen flicked his gaze at the heavy door and prayed salvation would come that way. But how could rescuers find him? He didn’t know where he was himself.
“That’s right,” said the masked woman. “Take a good look.”
His captor nonchalantly reached into the leather bag by her seat and brought out a metal canister.
What was that?
“I told you to look at the door!” she barked when she caught Wen staring wide eyed at the canister.
The woman’s anger was so sudden, so brutally intense that Wen flinched and almost toppled over the chair he’d been tied to. Wen made himself stare at the door, but his attention was on the cap unscrewing from the cannister. What was inside?
“It’s coffee, you piece of filth. Now, the door, damn you! The door! Tell me what you see. Where do you think we are?”
“Err… it’s rusted. Metal. Looks heavy. It was originally painted blue, but it’s mostly primer and bare metal now.”
“More!”
Wen heard coffee being poured into a plastic cup and breathed in the rich aroma. It was expensive real-caff, not synth.
“I’m waiting…”
“Yes, the door. Sorry. The air’s dank. Musty. There’s mold on the walls. I… I think we’re underground.” He looked at the rows of metal filing cabinets, but any identifying information had long ago moldered away. The cardboard boxes on the shelves by the metal door were thoroughly rotted.
The woman pulled the chin down on her face mask to widen the gap over her lips.
Wen watched her drink her coffee. Good coffee. Suddenly, he squeaked in fear. If help didn’t come through that damned door, then he would never taste coffee again. It felt as if his life was falling away from him, shedding the little details of mundanity first.
“Not very imaginative, are we, Gethren?”
He frowned at the coffee drinker, suddenly struck by the way she’d spoken his name.
It was familiar. He couldn’t place her, but… that meant this was personal.
What could he possibly have done to deserve being kidnapped?
The masked woman nodded as if to say she was aware of every thought passing through Wen’s head. And that she approved.
In fact, she seemed to be drinking up Wen’s fears as much as the coffee, savoring the exquisite taste.
“Regrettably, I have an appointment later,” she told him, “so I’ll have to chivvy you along. Perhaps you’re nervous? Are you? Are you nervous, Mr. Wen?”
“Yes. I’m scared. It’s a mistake. I can’t think what I could have done to deserve this. Let me go now, and I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
“Very well, Mr. Wen.”
“Really? You’ll let me go?”
“No, of course not. What would be the point of bringing you here and letting you leave before we’ve even properly started? I merely mean that I accept that anxiety is clouding your analytical mind.” She laughed as she poured herself more coffee. “And I have to admit some responsibility for your mental state. So let me help you along.”
She walked over to the door and rapped it with her knuckles, which produced a dull thud. “This place is rotted and forgotten, but the door and its surround remain thick and strong. We’re underneath the oldest government complex in Kaylingen. Like most of the earliest buildings in what was then a fledgling colony, it had to do double duty as a shelter. These rooms once had their own independent air supply. The corridor out there leads to another door like this. Technically, it isn’t actually a corridor. It’s an airlock.” She rapped the door again. “And this faithful old hatch was probably repurposed after a career on a colony starship. So, please, I invite you to scream, Gethren. No one will hear.”
She walked over to him, squatting down so her face was inches from Wen’s. “I want you to fully appreciate the hopelessness of your plight. After all, I have gone to considerable effort to bring you here. And no small risk, I can tell you.”
“What do you want from me?”
“For now? I want to tell you a story, Gethren.”
She took a sip of her drink. “It starts with a man. His name was Cornflower.”
Cornflower… Gethren racked his brains. He didn’t know anyone of that name. He’d worked at the Ministry for Offworld Mining most of his life. It had never been a big department, and In’Nalla believed in keeping government small. He would have known if there was a Cornflower. This had to be a stupid damned mistake.
“We met at work. Five years ago, it was. We were far from teenagers in years, but the intensity of the way I felt for him… it was as if I was in love for the very first time. I contrived reasons to walk past his work pod. To arrange meetings, projects, and in time significant government expenditure… all for the chance to be near him.
“But he was a subordinate. A relationship would be strictly forbidden. Which is why we almost never called each other by our real names.
“Maybe if Cornflower hadn’t felt the same way, I’d have taken a long fishing trip to the polar region with a case of brandy and forgotten him. But his beautiful corn blue eyes lit up with delight whenever I passed, and he was less guarded even than me. People began to notice. All those furtive glances… We needed to end that. I told him so.”
The masked woman fell silent, awash in her memories.
“What did he say?” Wen asked.
The woman frowned. She checked the cap on her coffee flask was screwed in tightly and then struck it hard across Wen’s temple.
Pain lanced through his head, blurring his vision.
“I am telling a story, Mr. Wen. It is rude to interrupt.”
“Sorry,” Wen whispered, still wincing with pain.
“Cornflower, of course, had been waiting for this moment. Preparing for it. He’d already established a false identity and used it to rent an apartment near Tattenhoe. I went there whenever I could.” She sighed. “Eiylah-Bremah is not a world in which it is easy to be happy. But we were. For a time. For a little over a year we were free, and it was beautiful.”
She fixed Wen with a fierce gla
re. “And now we go further back in time. A year before I met Cornflower, he was at a bar, simply enjoying an evening with friends. The drink must have flowed freely because the topic of conversation strayed into politics.”
Wen took a sharp breath. He began to see where this might be heading, but Cornflower…? Who was this man?
“Yes, you see, Gethren. I did tell you he wasn’t as guarded as me. He expressed the opinion that we should engage in dialog with political dissenters rather than dehumanize and criminalize them. WCDs we call them. Willfully Cancerous Dissenters. He even dared to suggest that using the term for anyone who harbors inappropriate thoughts was unhelpful.
“I must point out that Cornflower himself despised the WCDs. He was no rebel idealist. In fact, he hated dissent in all its forms, but felt that our intolerance for them only drove the WCDs to breed like a plague of vermin.”
She reached into her bag. “That hardly made him a WCD, does it, Gethren?”
Wen shook his head but didn’t dare speak.
“Cornflower never told me what he’d said that night. Perhaps he was so drunk he’d forgotten. But he’d been recorded, and his sentiment logged.
“I never learned how or who. Perhaps his friends had secretly recorded everything in case a speech crime was committed. Or it could have been the bar’s surveillance, or a hidden camera planted by the REDDs.”
“I’m not…” Wen mouthed.
“What’s that? Speak up, man!”
“I’m nothing to do with the Re-Education Discovery Division,” he whispered. “Please don’t hit me again.”
“You don’t work for the REDDs, Gethren. But you are connected. Oh, yes. Fast forward two years to In’Nalla’s proudest achievement – the Night of Cleansing. All those new speech and thought crimes announced at midnight, and applied retrospectively. All those cases readied in secret by the REDDs to pass over to the enforcement division. Did you know in advance about the Night of Cleansing, Gethren?”
Mouth trembling, Wen nodded.
“I’m sure you did. And so–” The woman choked on her memories. “And so did I. Far more than you.”
Chimera Company Season 2 - Deep Cover Page 32
