Copyright © 2017 Margaret Ball
Published by Galway Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-947648-02-9
ISBN eBook: 978-1-947648-03-6
Printed in the United States of America
Cover and Interior Design: Ghislain Viau
Cover Art: Bogdan Maksimovic
For Steve, my First Reader, who doesn’t even like science fiction but reads my manuscripts anyway.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
PROLOGUE
The age of space exploration did not start immediately after the discovery of wormholes that connected far-distant parts of the galaxy. It started a generation later, after physicists and engineers figured out how to build a very small spaceship that would not be torn apart by the unpredictable fluctuations of spacetime around wormholes.
The age of colonization was yet another generation distant; it took that long to develop ships large enough to withstand the assault on their geometry that occurred at wormholes.
Harmony Colony was one of the earliest settlements, founded by a group of idealists who wanted to build a new society without any of the bigotry or greed or hate of the world they were leaving behind. There was no shortage of volunteers; four colony ships were required just to transport the starter population.
Over the generations, the continuing battle against anti-social thinking bred a number of obdurate citizens who refused to conform to the standards of Harmony. Fortunately there existed a second continent, uninviting to the original settlers, to which these criminals could be deported. Harmony named this land the Penal Colony; the deportees called it Esilia, the land of exiles.
After generations of sending anyone who had issues with the central government, Harmony should not have been surprised when Esilians decided they wanted to be independent of the homeland and its taxes.
CHAPTER ONE
“Do I have to spell it out? You. Are. Not. Going.” Jesse glowered at the younger and slighter man who stood casually leaning on a needle tree at the edge of the clearing.
“Maybe I’m the one who should spell it out. I. Am. Your. Captain. And I do not send my men out into danger that I don’t share.” Gabrel Moresco folded his arms and returned Jesse’s glare.
“Ha! Captain? Just because Travis sprinkled commissions around like Festival candy doesn’t mean you outrank me.”
“Actually, Jesse, it does.”
“As your medic, I’m reporting you to yourself as not fit for duty. If you hadn’t taken a dive into that ravine—”
“I’d be terminally unfit for duty, with a burn from a blaster that was cranked up to maximum. I’d probably be melted. Did you see what happened to the olive tree?”
“But you did leap into the ravine, and unlike the native animals you don’t have four little hooves to help you balance, and you went down and twisted your knee so badly we had to drag you out of there.”
“I would have been fine! Only there was this round rock… it turned underfoot. Could have happened to anybody.”
“Doesn’t matter how it happened. The fact is that you can’t put your weight on that leg without gasping. You’ve probably pulled a tendon. You’re a liability to any raiding party. Hell, you can’t even hobble down the mountain to where the float is waiting.”
“So strap it tighter.”
“Bind it any tighter and I’ll cut off your circulation. Stand down, Gabrel. This is not your party.”
“It was my idea!” But Gabrel shut up. Jesse was right and he knew it; a man who couldn’t run had no business on a raid. Even a supposedly peaceful mission like the one he’d planned had the potential to go south at any moment. He’d be putting the others in even more danger if he insisted on accompanying them.
He limped to the big throne-like boulder on the far side of the clearing and whistled to gather the rest of his men.
“Ravi, you’re in charge. You know where the float’s waiting for us.” A farmer whose land spanned the lower foothills and a part of the plain had agreed to supply an anonymous float for the raiders. Gabrel didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, exactly how the farmer had scrounged a float that had no connection to him.
“Patrik, put on the other uniform; you’ll sit up front with Ravi.” Gabrel concealed a sigh. In all the planning for this trip, he had imagined himself beside Ravi, disguised in one of the enemy’s self-fitting smartcloth uniforms, lying his way to the target. Oh, well. Patrik was the obvious replacement for him; best liar on the mountain. The danger was that he’d get carried away and say too much.
“Martin, Isak, stay out of sight in the back after you get the float loaded. I’ve paid Skyros for the use of their pack donkeys and their produce; they’ll be loading up now and one of the boys will have them waiting for you behind the farm. They’ll wait until you get back.” He went on with the briefing, knowing he was emphasizing points he’d already made. But if he couldn’t be with them, they had to know the plan by heart.
Eventually there was no more to say, and it was time for the four men to leave if they were to rendezvous with the Skyros pack train, shift the product into the float, and glide over the plains in time to reach their goal that night. Evening. They had to get there while their targets were still awake. Had he emphasized that enough?
***
The two young men in the uniform of the Harmony Expeditionary Force were not talking, and were running their transport float on low power. Apart from that, they did not seem to be making any particular effort to evade sentries.
“Be discreet, tactful, but not evasive,” their chief had told them before they left. “They’ll be much more suspicious if they spot you trying to sneak in. Remember – you may be, technically, breaking some of the Army’s rules, but the one you’re obviously breaking is one just about any sentry would wink at – particularly if you give him a sample.”
“And if we run afoul of the one honest sentry in the camp?”
“Try to get past him somehow. Use your initiative.” Gabrel’s quick grin had flashed across his lean face. “Just bear in mind that leaving a trail of bodies is bound to get noticed. If you can stay inconspicuous this will be the perfect crime, because nobody will even know it happened Those idiots in B ring will just think they made a good trade with somebody on the outer perimeter.”
That guidance was on Ravi’s mind, but he still couldn’t make himself steer the float right through the sentry line without first checking it out. He stilled the float behind a patch of bloodybush and raised his night-vision goggles to watch for the sentries. Gliding through the first perimeter would be easier, all round, than gambling that they had the right
password and that the sentry who challenged them could be bribed with a sample of their cargo.
Finally, one soldier trudging the perimeter became visible as a green form at the edge of his vision. He walked slowly and deliberately along the trodden-down grass, continuously playing his blaster light around the outside of the perimeter. Ravi wished that his chosen bloodybush had more foliage, and prayed that no reflection would flash off his extremely undisguised float.
He stopped directly opposite their patch of bush and waited several seconds while the cold sweat trickled down Ravi’s back. Had he somehow caught sight of them, a sense of their presence? If they were discovered hiding behind a bloodybush in a patch of Stinking Billy, it might be somewhat difficult to claim that this was just an innocent foraging party returning to base. Gabrel had told them…
Some people swore that they could sense when they were being stared at. Ravi didn’t believe it, but just in case, he lowered his eyes to the float controls and depended on his sense of hearing.
After an eternity that lasted perhaps a minute and a half, the sentry sighed deeply, reversed course, and went back along the perimeter the same way as he’d come.
“One professional,” Patrik murmured when the man was well on his way. “And maybe one lazy bum who is dozing instead of walking his sector?”
“He could just be late,” Ravi responded. “Might show up any minute now.”
Patrik could be counted on to make the most optimistic deduction possible in any set of circumstances. Ravi felt it his duty to balance things with an extra dose of pessimism. But as the minutes went by, he began to agree with Patrik’s theory.
“If we wait long enough,” Patrik prodded, “our professional sentry will come back on his next round.”
True enough. The intelligence they’d gleaned from the locals was that each sentry had a relatively short stretch to guard. “All right, all right,” Ravi muttered. “Let’s go for it.” He dropped the night-vision goggles so that he could steer past inanimate obstacles, backed the float away from the bloodybush and glided towards the point where the sentry had stopped and waited for his opposite number. Would coming into the camp from a place where two sentries met bolster their credibility? His shoulders tensed as they crossed the line, but the local intelligence was good again; there was no hidden barrier of sensors to catch them. The Army wasn’t really worried about people crossing into the outer ring, and a sensor alarm would seriously inconvenience the locals who came as far as C ring daily with luxuries like fresh fruit to trade.
The outposts along C ring looked like little more than one-room syncrete squares printed with two windows and a door. The two nearest Ravi were lit up like a carnival, and from one of them came the rhythmic boom of Harmony’s latest hit band. Good; those soldiers would be blinded and deafened by their own lights and music. And the ones in the two neighboring outposts wouldn’t have much night vision left if they glanced at the Party Post. Ravi steered closer to the musical outpost. Getting past this bunch should be easy enough.
And it would have been, if one of the partying soldiers hadn’t come outside to water a post. Or if Ravi had kept the goggles on. As it was, the float bumped against something soft and yielding. There was a thump and a curse. So much for the low profile.
“What the discord are you doing out here without lights?” the soldier grumbled, getting to his feet.
“Shhh!” Patrik said. “You don’t want your friends to hear.”
“I don’t?” The man stood uncertainly, swaying a little on his feet. His breath stank of Harmony beer.
“Got something a little better than that sour beer here,” Patrik murmured, laying a finger alongside his nose and winking. “What would you say to a jug of best lightning jack, straight from a mountain still?”
That sobered the soldier up in a hurry. “You serious? Lightning jack?”
“Have a taste if you don’t believe me,” Patrik said, uncorking the jug that he’d kept up front for just this purpose and offering it to the soldier.
The man put the top of the jug to his lips and tilted it back in preparation for a long, generous swallow.
A moment later he lowered the jug and breathed out harshly three or four times. “That’s some powerful jack,” he said though a suddenly raspy throat.
“You probably never had any before that wasn’t watered down. Like I said, this is straight from the mountains.”
“Discording right!” The soldier regarded the jug reverently.
“We got to deliver this load to our buyer, but we’ll be happy to leave this jug with you in consideration of you not alerting any officers who just might disapprove.”
“Who you delivering to?”
“Officers, of course. But you can be sure they’d disapprove of you having some. Be a terrible waste if they smashed all our jugs and poured the jack on the ground.
“Sure would,” the soldier agreed. “Probably kill all the grass and stinkweed on the spot, too.” He stared at the jug again, eyes narrowed. “This here’s too much for one man, not enough to pass around. And if I don’t drink it all, I got no place to hide it. Now that would be another turble waste, don’t you agree?”
Patrik sighed elaborately. “I can see you’re a sharp bargainer, friend. All right, it just about kills me to be giving this stuff away, but you can have two jugs. That should be enough to give you and the rest of the post a real happy night.”
Ravi started breathing again after he had restarted the float and moved silently into the darkness between the rings of guard posts. “It worked.”
“Of course. Gabrel said it would, didn’t he?”
“Umm.” Ravi was occasionally inclined to doubt their chief’s omniscience. “These uniforms are good. It’s like they were tailored to fit. Wish we could get smartcloth.”
The uniforms would also add to their chances being shot as spies if they were caught. At least the two men hiding in the back of the float didn’t have that risk. They’d probably just be shot on general principle.
“Yeah,” Patrik agreed to distract himself from that overly pessimistic line of thought. “I don’t suppose they contracted for smartcloth uniforms just to make life easier for anybody who wanted to steal a couple of them and pass as soldiers. One of those unforeseen consequences.” He slowed the float to a near-standstill as the lighted huts of the B ring came into view. These posts were closer together than those in the C ring; a shout at one would be heard at the neighboring two. Oh, joy.
“It’ll be the one on the right,” Patrik said helpfully.
“If we came in at the exact same spot Peres described.” There was no shortage of bloodybush patches outside the camp perimeter. Ravi handed the goggles to Patrik. “Use these and make sure we don’t bump into another wandering soldier.”
“And what will you be doing?”
“Driving. And looking for a way to identify B12.” Ravi nudged the float forward at what felt like millimeters at a time. As they came closer to the squares of light shed by the guard posts, he gave a deep sigh of relief. “God bless the Army, they label everything. Got the number of each post on a tidy little sign. Here it is.”
“I was right!”
“Almost,” Ravi said drily. “Happens to be the one on the left, though.”
The Ring B guard posts were larger than the C posts, probably printed from a two- or three- room program. Ravi navigated the float to just outside a door on the side of B12, then backed it off several feet. Just in case Peres had betrayed them, there was no point in parking right outside a door that could open on an array of fully powered blasters set to kill.
“What’s that doing there?” Patrik suddenly asked.
There were two doors on this side but no windows, so they had to do without the faint light shed in front of the guard post. As Ravi’s eyes recovered from the lighted area they’d just traversed, he saw what Patrik was referring to. A very tiny flitter, a single-person float, was settled discreetly in a dark corner where the post’s back w
all was augmented by a sort of shanty of irregular vines.
He shook his head. “Dunno. But I’m pretty sure it didn’t carry a platoon of armed guards to intercept us. Probably it’s something else these guys scrounged. Peres did say they’re the most shameless thieves in the Army.”
Still, the presence of the unexplained flitter added a little extra nervousness to Ravi’s discreet scratch at the door.
***
Inside Outpost B12, the terminally bored soldiers had finished a meal consisting mainly of nanosludge and were lackadaisically fantasizing about what the officers quartered in Colony City were eating.
“Omelets,” one suggested. “With real eggs, not that nanosynth crap.”
“Pie,” said Druett, who had a sweet tooth. “Thornberry pie, curd pie, chocolate pie…”
“Fellows, after we shift that thing,” said Corporal Bollinjer, “we’ll be able to trade for any kind of food we want.” He jerked his head towards the closed door of the storage cabinet, which was apparently inadequate for their needs; most of the post’s stores were neatly stacked in a corner of the main room.
“Yeah – once we shift it. Why couldn’t you have nobbled something we could use instead of that?”
“Fellows, you just don’t appreciate me. I am the unrecognized king of all the nobblers, wanglers, and scroungers in this man’s army. When something that valuable ‘falls off the back of the truck,’ you don’t pass on the opportunity just because it’s not something you personally want. You take it and turn it into something you do want. Thanks to the general’s views on abstinence, jugs of uncut lightning jack are as good as currency out here. B12 will be famous for its gourmet feasts. We can probably even invite girls.”
“Girls…” the three sighed as one man, and their eyes were drawn to the door of the back room, which had been temporarily ceded to the fourth member of the group in view of his need for privacy.
“Kelso’s probably the only happy grunt in B ring right now,” Druett voiced their common thought.
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 1
