by James Axler
Meanwhile, he had his own progress on which to focus. The crowd followed him at a distance while the sec escorted him from the sector. He could hear them at his back. As opposed to the confusion and hostility that had greeted his arrival, there was now a ground-swell of discontent that he was being moved. He had become one of them. It may just serve him well.
As he came to the area where they would cross into a new sector, he passed Curtis’s hut. The sector leader stood outside, fully clothed for once, smirking as the Armorer was taken past him. There was no sign of the two young women who fed Curtis’s desire. To outside eyes, the sector leader would appear to be a model of propriety. It was a small thing to consider, but J.B. would enjoy events wiping the smirk from his face.
They crossed into another sector, then passed through this one at triple speed before crossing into another. J.B. recognized the route from his previous journey out. These two sectors were on the way to the center. Two things crossed his mind. The first was that he might have been wrong in his assumption, and he was being taken to Arcadian. That would be sweet. What better place to kick-start the revolt? Lurking behind that was the question of whether or not they were passing through the sectors where Jak or Millie and Doc were quartered. If so, then chance would be aided. One thing for sure: Jak had spoken of heavy patrols in his sector. Here, there were only a few patrols, and the sector prior to this had seemed to be free.
Mentally, J.B. was running myriad possibilities, working out a game plan for each one if he could. So it was with a sudden start that he realized they had changed direction and crossed into another sector. Here, it was quiet. There was no one on the streets, and yet sec patrols could be seen on street corners, fairly heavy security for somewhere that seemed to be deserted. J.B. felt his heart sink. There was only one place this could be, and it seemed as though he would be forced into doing things the hard way.
He began to prepare himself as they approached a building whose porticoed arch led into a square. In the middle of the square a small, wizened, white-coated man peering at him myopically stood waiting between two heavily built and equally heavily armed guards.
“Ah,” he said as J.B. was led to him, “Mr. Dix. Yes…” He halted the sec party with a gesture and, still flanked by his personal guard, walked through them to examine J.B.
The Armorer stood impassive, not wishing to give anything away. The whitecoat walked around him, making small noises of pleasure and affirmation to himself. He grasped J.B. by the chin and turned his head so that he could get a better look at him, squinting up at the Armorer’s face. His grip was surprisingly strong, and it was all J.B. could do to prevent himself from wincing in pain as the viselike fingers tightened on his jaw.
“Yes… As I thought,” the whitecoat said softly. “Perfect apart from the sight defect. A good specimen…” He let go of J.B.’s jaw, leaving the Armorer numb and with a temptation to shake his head to restore feeling. “Well, my friend,” the whitecoat said, “it would be a shame to let you fester with that pervert Curtis when your problem is such a simple one.”
J.B. didn’t think he had a problem, but he let that go. However, what he heard next made his mouth dry up and make any protest impossible.
“It’s a simple procedure. We have some perfect specimens we can use for transplant. Don’t worry, my dear boy, we’ll soon have a pair of perfect eyeballs popped in there.”
He slipped his hand into one of his bags, his imperfect eyes flickering side to side. He ignored the blaster and the blade, thanking anything and anyone that they hadn’t thought to relieve him of his weapons. He sought a gren and thumbed the pin. He would have to act quickly if he wasn’t going to get blasted himself.
But then again, he would have to act quickly, no matter what.
MARTHA COULD FEEL her heart pounding as she walked quickly to the wooded areas that ringed the sector. She was hoping that the lack of vid cams here, and the crowd that had gathered around J.B.’s departure, necessitating a redeployment of regular sec patrols, would make her task easier.
She paused, looking around. There seemed to be no one who had noticed her slip away. Certainly no one in view around here. She tried to listen for any sound, but all she could hear was the nervous and irregular pounding of her own heart. As she paused, so the dog stopped at her feet and looked up, whining softly as her unease communicated itself to him.
“Don’t worry, just keep to heel,” she said softly, petting him as he took a last look around.
The mangy hound was at her heels as she scurried into the mangrove, picking her way toward the area where she had stood with J.B. and Jak the previous night…only a few short hours before, though it seemed an eternity right now.
She broke into a run, gasping for breath and moving blindly as panic overtook her. The dog barked at her heels. She had no idea where she was going, now, only that—
Her flight was arrested by a man who stepped from behind a tree and caught hold of her, clapping a hand over her mouth to stifle the scream she couldn’t contain. But the dog didn’t growl. It took a moment, but she recognized the man from the meeting the night before. She had reached her destination. He unclamped his hand as he sensed her breathing return to normal.
“It’s started,” she gasped between breaths. Then her vision began to swim, and she was aware of the dog yelping in fear as she fell backward and all went black.
IF J.B. HAD BEEN GIVEN the time to think about it, he would have wondered at the strangeness of a man’s psyche. He thumbed the pin from the gren, holding down to give himself as much time as possible, and carefully extracted the object from his bag. He thought he caught a puzzled expression on the faces of Andower’s guards, but he could have been mistaken. He shuffled his feet as the whitecoat made to grasp his chin again.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Dix, we’ll soon have you seeing better than ever. It won’t hurt a bit…well, not a lot,” Andower said, misunderstanding J.B.’s action.
Good. Every fraction of a second was precious. J.B. took advantage of this misunderstanding by stepping back, thrusting backward through the sec guards. Surprised by his actions, they let him pass through. He turned and ran, hoping that he had guessed right.
“My dear man, running won’t help. There’s nowhere to go. We can easily bring you back— Hello, what’s that?”
Andower’s words were prompted by the object he saw roll at his feet. Unused as they were to any opposition, the sec had slow reactions, which was exactly what the Armorer had counted upon. Not only were they slow to react to his bursting through them, they also failed to notice that he had let something roll at his feet.
He didn’t dare to look back: no time. He had his eyes set on the portico. No blasterfire from behind him, though he was certain he could hear the cocking of blasters ready to fire. They would aim to wound, not chill. He was sure of that, although he didn’t trust their aim. No, it was something far more deadly that he sought to escape.
“Move,” he heard someone yell. Getting Andower out of the way? There probably wasn’t—
The shock wave threw him forward, pitching him into the gap made by the portico. He used the momentum to carry himself through, rolling as he did so that he could push himself to one side, and avoid the channeled blast of air through the hole. The disturbed air threatened his eardrums, even though he let his jaw hang loose. Under the explosion, there was the symphony of breaking glass as the force of the blast shattered every window in the square. Rising above it all were the high-pitched screams of men torn to shreds by the shrapnel in the gren.
Had Andower been shuffled out of the way in time? The end of the whitecoat would be a good thing in itself. But there was no time for him to think about that now. Heaving and rasping to get air back into his lungs, J.B. sought cover as he fumbled the mini-Uzi from its place of concealment. The street was still empty, but it wouldn’t be for long. He needed somewhere to dig in, and then hope for the best.
Martha and Jak…
AS SHE CAME AROUND, Ma
rtha could hear voices barking orders, many of them, shouting over each other. The dog licked her face, happy that she was waking as it was upset and confused by the activity around, whining softly. She petted it to reassure it, then sat up. She had been moved to the rebel camp by the man she had—literally—run into. All around, men and women of varying ages were preparing their weapons. A man came over to her. She recognized him as one of the men she had seen talking to Ryan and Krysty just a few hours before.
“Where did they take him?” he asked without preamble.
She shook her head. “I don’t know which sector. He tried to get them to give it away, but they didn’t. I just know that they took him. I came straightaway. They couldn’t have gone far.”
As she spoke, a distant rumble echoed over the mangrove. A crooked smile crossed the face of the man standing over her.
“He wouldn’t let them—that’s a fucking gren. Can’t remember the last time… Come on,” he yelled, turning away.
In a blur of activity, she found herself swept up by the onrush of the rebels. Adrenaline pumping, the dog still at her heels, and unarmed, she found herself joining them as they ran through the woods, spreading out as it became thinner, moving into the outer areas of Sector Eight and finding that the shanty ville was already in uproar. Previously passive citizens who had been milling around in the wake of J.B.’s departure, and then stirred by the blast, were being beaten back into their homes by the sec patrols. The first volleys of blasterfire from the rebels cut into the sec. Now, not knowing whether to stick to their task or fight back, their attention divided, the patrols found themselves in an alien position.
The unarmed dwellers picked up rocks and started to fight back. When the sec patrols turned on them, they found themselves under volleys of fire. Some fell as they were hit. Dwellers picked up the weapons, fired up by events, and joined the onrushing rebels. Martha picked up a handblaster. She had only ever seen them used, and had never handled one. But she had a personal mission.
As the sec was driven back, they approached Curtis’s quarters. The sec chief was standing outside his hut, incoherently yelling orders to his men, grasping a longblaster that he held across his chest, more as a talisman than an offensive weapon.
Martha threaded through the crowd until she was almost in front of him. In the confusion, he didn’t even register her until she had raised her blaster at him. The look of shock on his face was priceless. So much she wanted to say that to him before firing, but he started to level his blaster and there was no time. She fired three times, the kick making her old shoulders and wrists jar with pain.
One shot missed. The second took off the right side of his face, tearing through his eye socket and splintering the surrounding bone. The third was lower, and ripped into his thorax. He was thrown backward into the arms of the two fat women, who screamed as his blood pumped over them.
Martha stood stock-still for a moment, shocked by what she had done, yet also glad. It was the dog, pawing at her with a preternatural sense, that brought her back to reality.
With the mangy hound at her heels, she moved toward the onrushing rebel group. Safety in numbers: relative, sure, but all she had now in this new uncer tainty. And she felt different, like they may soon be free, even if it took their lives.
“S CHWEIZ. WHERE IS that moron? I want him here now!” Arcadian strode back and forth across the plush carpet in his quarters. He could no longer take standing in the radio room, listening to the reports as they came in. First the man Dix tries to chill Andower and make a break; then the rebels invade the eighth sector and the dimmies who live there join them.
The gren blast could be heard to some degree across the whole of the ville: that was what had first alerted the baron to the evolving problem. Outside, in the central sector, there was now unrest as the populace clamored to know what was happening. Schweiz had panicked. The sec force was trying to quell a riot that was rapidly of their own making. Sending them in hard had been a poor piece of judgment.
“Sir, I need to see you.” The sec chief, looking flustered even behind his shades, appeared in the doorway.
“It’s the other way around, surely?” the baron asked with ice dripping from his tone. “I wanted to see you. What are you doing about the rebels and Dix? And why are you trying to punish the people outside instead of keeping them calm and informed?”
“It’s best they know nothing, sir. Not until we have stopped the revolt.”
“Revolt?” Arcadian went puce and his voice rose in both octaves and decibels. “You complete fuckwit. The people of this sector are the elite. This is what all citizenry aspires to. You don’t try to beat them into submission and ignore the real problem. And what revolt? A few rebels who have the element of surprise. A swift retaliatory action and—”
“But the manpower, sir. They have numbers and it’s going to take time, and—”
“And you panicked. You’re a great disappointment to me, Schweiz,” Arcadian said sadly. He shook his head. “I never thought it would come to this.” Without warning, he reached into his robes and extracted a small handblaster. Schweiz was openmouthed. In all the time he had been sec chief, Arcadian had always proclaimed that he wouldn’t carry a blaster. The baron read his expression. “This?” he said, indicating the blaster. He shrugged. “A man has to have something to fall back on.”
With which he raised it and loosed one shot. Schweiz’s eyes were wide-open in shock, visible as the shades tumbled from his nose. A trickle of blood from the single wound in his forehead trickled down to the line on the bridge where those shades had once rested, before he tumbled backward.
The baron stepped over his corpse, sucking his teeth at the mess the blood was making on his carpet. He strode to the radio room and seized the transmitter from the hands of his radio op.
“Listen here. This is your baron speaking. All sec on the east side to head for Sector Eight. Contain and eliminate the rebels. West side, I want you to head to the surgery area and eliminate the man known as Dix. I don’t care how. I want these problems stamped on now.”
He handed the transmitter back to the openmouthed radio op. “But sir,” he said finally, “that leaves everything else wide-open.”
Arcadian dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Doesn’t matter. Hit the bastards hard enough, and the teams will be back before anyone even notices they’ve gone. This will soon pass.”
J AK HAD BEEN LUCKY. Pulaski had, that very morning, told him and three others that they were to be the subjects of a nocturnal assault course test. As such, they were excused for the day and ordered to rest for the forthcoming exercise. It was exactly what Jak could have wished. Rest be damned, he was restless and waiting for action. And now he was free to act when the time came.
The first indication had been the blast. Jak had heard it, as had most people scattered across the ville. But unlike the majority, he was able to pinpoint where the sound had originated. As he hung out of the window at his quarters, watching intently the streets below, he could also smell it in the air—the explosive in the gren and the warm smell of roasted flesh, caught in the blast. He could also see the streets emptying of sec patrols as they rushed past, out of their usual patterns, toward the sector where the blast had originated.
He also realized something that had been staring him in the face all along, and he cursed himself for being a stupe.
All along, there had been a view that the vid cams were there for the baron to keep track of what and where his people were at any given time. Now that this emergency had occurred, you would have expected the cams to move out of synch, and to follow the movement on the streets.
But they didn’t. They merely moved in the same old patterns.
Jak had assumed that the cable feeds ran inside the poles on which they were mounted. But what if there were no cable feeds? Thinking back, they had seen many things at the baron’s central administration building, but never once had they seen a room with vid monitors. Also, the way in which he h
ad discovered people moved freely at night, albeit with practiced caution, was unlikely. Surely, even by chance, some would have been caught and sec procedures changed?
Jak realized that the vid cams were another of the baron’s mind games. He didn’t have the tech, but he had the psychology to make his people believe he had that tech, and that he was watching them all the time, so constraining their actions.
Jak cursed again, then cracked his grim white visage with a grin.
Maybe he had been in the dark—literally and figuratively—before. Now that he was in the light, this would make his task so much easier.
He hurried from his quarters, leaving the building by the front this time. He had no time to waste, and nothing now to prevent him from making the best time by whatever means.
And from the distant sounds of fighting that reached him, it wasn’t a moment too soon.
THAT CHANGE WAS in the air was apparent to Mildred and Doc, even though they had no idea of what had occurred the night before, and even though their sector had no official sec parties that could be withdrawn. They heard the distant blast, and there was an indefinable something that altered in the mood of the ville around them.
At the time, they were in the square where the chess games took place, watching yet another interminable and impermeable game being played on the large board in the center.
“It’s not surprising they play stupid games like this if there isn’t anything else to do,” Mildred remarked. “I know I sure as hell would go crazy after a few months in here. Come to that, I’m not sure that I’m not anyway.”
“Let me assure that you are not, my dear Mildred,” Doc purred with a malicious grin.
