“Good,” Serina said again. “All we can do now is wait.”
Flint
People didn’t flock to Flint as he’d expected; rather, they turned and walked away from him as he entered the pen they were trapped in. The woman he’d made eye contact with averted her eyes and stepped in the other direction, as if he was some sort of pariah.
“Don’t mind them,” a voice said from behind him.
Flint twisted around and saw the face behind the gravelly voice. The man was old, gnarled fists compressed at his sides. He was wearing a white shirt torn loose at the collar, and a pair of medical scrub bottoms tied tightly around his narrow waist. Everyone in here was wasting away; all of them had dark, sunken eyes.
“Why’s that?” Flint asked.
“Because most of them have lost their will to live.” The man stepped forward cautiously, as if he was approaching a potentially dangerous animal. Still, he stuck out a hand. Flint shook it, surprised at the strength in the other man’s grip.
“I don’t blame them. What’s your name?” Flint asked.
The man’s stare went distant. Flint wondered if he had trouble remembering who he was. “Clark. Clark T. Billings at your service.”
“Clark. Pleased to meet a friendly face here.” Flint cringed as the old man gave him a gap-toothed smile and rubbed his wispy white hair with a palm. “I’m Flint Lancaster.”
“Where’d they get you from?” Clark asked. “We haven’t seen any newcomers in almost a year.”
A year. These people were in a dire situation. No wonder they were wandering around like zombies in a cage. Flint gauged the room, making sure there were no Watchers listening in near the glass. He put a hand on Clark’s arm and led him further inside. Flint saw the bunks at the side of the room now. There were at least fifty of the bunk beds lining the entire wall. To the left, he spotted the old washrooms, and wondered if they still worked.
“I came from the other side of the Rift. A number of us returned to help, but we were followed by some unfriendly types. We went to secure one of their warships, and voilà. Here I am.” Flint watched the man’s attention go from passing interest to excitement in a few short sentences.
Clark’s voice lowered, and he leaned in, his breath stale. “Did you say the war’s still ongoing? We’re still fighting them?”
Flint nodded before prying the man’s firm grasp off his bicep. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“This changes everything. There’s someone I want you to meet.” Clark turned and walked away, obviously expecting Flint to follow him.
Flint took a deep breath, regretting it immediately. It stank inside the room. These people were being forced to live in filth. “Who is it?”
Clark glanced over his shoulder. “The Boss.”
Flint didn’t know what to expect, but along the short walk to the far left edge of the training grounds, he found a cluster of people sitting in a circle. The light here was bright, and Flint looked up to the ceiling, noticing the immense skylights for the first time. Even out here, the sun still gave them ample light. Too high to climb and break out of, probably.
Clark cleared his throat, and Flint tried to soak in the image in front of him. There were three men, four women, and two children on the floor. One person was seated in a makeshift chair. It was made from pieces of a bed frame.
“Clark, what can we…” The woman in the chair stopped when she saw Flint. “Who’s this?” She stood, walking through her seated disciples.
“I take it you’re the Boss?” Flint asked, and the woman’s eyes glimmered. She was skinny, long hair years past graying, but her smile met his, eyes crinkled as she reached a hand to his.
“You assume correctly.” Her voice was light, smooth.
“He’s from the other side of the Rift. He bears news,” Clark said, and now the group of people on the floor stood, gathering around.
“Is that true?” the Boss asked, face otherwise unreadable.
Flint thought he might have an ally in here after all. She had Fleet written all over her. Many of these people probably came from the Fleet. Maybe they were trained, and with some planning and work, they’d be able to find a way to escape. He had to try. He hadn’t made it this far to die in a remote human prison. “It’s true. We came to help win the war.”
Ace
“Sending the coordinates now,” Lieutenant Collins said from his own modified EFF-17. Ace was flying beside him in his own fighter, waiting for word from Shadow. The two of them had offered to make the trip, but Oliv was mad at him for going without her. He hadn’t had a choice. Serina would never let him lead the mission. He was still that gangly kid to her, and always would be.
“Got them. On your word,” Ace said as his HUD alerted him that the Shift drive was charged and ready for the trip. They were heading for an extremely remote area of the system. With the current alignment of the planets, there was nothing near them as they appeared, coming out of the Shift.
“Scanning for signals,” Collins’ voice said.
Ace looked at his HUD and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Serina had been worried about two things: first, that the Shadow group might send someone to harm or destroy the awaiting Fleet pilots. Second, that they might have sold or bartered the information to the Invaders, as Serina called them. Ace hoped neither was the case. From what Benson had told Wren, Shadow was named that because she’d never been seen in the open. She sent her people to do jobs while she did just like her name said: hid in the shadows.
Benson suspected that she was holed up somewhere safe, amassing as much ammunition and fleet as she could, trying to wait out the conflict. Getting this group on their side was imperative to success. They needed the help to win this thing once and for all.
Ace could sense the shift in Serina’s behavior already. Since they’d arrived, and now with the impending news of working with the terrorist organization, she had a new proverbial hop in her step. It was giving her crew, as well as the Pilgrim and the Eureka, a sense of possibilities.
“Incoming,” Ace said, spotting something appearing a thousand kilometers away. It was close, but just off from the coordinates they’d sent Shadow. It looked to be a probe, perhaps the same one Serina had shipped their way.
“Be careful,” Collins said, taking the lead. His fighter headed for the target, and Ace stayed a short way behind the other man, as planned. If something unusual happened, Ace was to Shift back to their envoy and let them know without hesitation. His Shift drive was charged, ready to make the trip with the touch of a button.
“Everything scans normal. The probe doesn’t appear to have any suspicious attachments. Wait, what’s that?” Collins sounded frazzled, and Ace saw why. Five vessels had appeared in the space between Collins and the probe. One second, there was nothing but the vastness of the solar system; the next, there was an armed fleet.
Ace’s heart rate picked up as his adrenaline kicked in. He zoomed, seeing the ships for what they were: battered freighters and clunky two-hundred-year-old fighters. Still, they did appear to have Shift drives, and that made them dangerous.
“They aren’t moving.” Ace was supposed to leave Collins there if something happened, but he couldn’t abandon the man, not after everything they’d been through.
His communication line beeped, and a message played in his speakers. “Earth Fleet, don’t be afraid. We only come to ensure we weren’t being tricked. Proceed to the probe. You will not be attacked.” The voice was slightly garbled, like it was being modified. Ace heard the words but still felt trepidation at the scenario.
“Collins, what do you want to do?” Ace asked. The Shadow ships hit their thrusters, moving away from the probe target, giving Collins a straight line at it.
“What we came here to do. Stay calm. Stick to the plan. This goes haywire, you leave.” Collins’ fighter raced toward the probe, and Ace zoomed, watching an arm extend from the underbelly of the ship. It clamped onto the probe and pulled it in close.
; The Shadow group stayed out of the way. After a few minutes, they were gone as quickly as they’d arrived, leaving Ace and Collins the only two ships in the vicinity once again.
Ace’s heart was still pounding as they Shifted back to the Eureka.
Flint
Flint stared up at the bottom of the bunk above him, thinking how cruel the fates were. Against all probable odds, he’d traveled through a Rift only to crash-land on a strange planet, had managed to get off alive, then took a virus to the Watchers, killing countless of them along the way. After making it home alive once again, he’d been captured and now found himself stuck on Europa, where a major part of the whole experience had started when he’d met here with Benson.
Flint wanted to sleep, to recharge after his first three days in the encampment. He preferred to think of it as that rather than what it really was: being a prisoner in a war camp. All around him, the sounds of the sickly prevailed over the silence of the night. People coughed, the man on the bunk across from him had a sticky-sounding wheeze that told Flint he wouldn’t be around for long, and somewhere down the line, a woman cried, trying to muffle the sobs into her thin mattress.
It was all terribly depressing, but Flint wasn’t going to let himself be dragged down by them, because he’d talked to the Boss and they were working on a plan. He liked to consider himself a bit of a smooth operator when it came to elaborate ruses, and this was going to have to be one of his best yet, if there was any chance of escaping the clutches of the Watchers on a colony moon where the enemy had made their home.
Flint was going to be the center of the subterfuge, and if he could get out, he’d cause as much chaos as he could before leaving port. Lying on his back at that moment, hearing the pitiful sounds of the other human captives, he did start to feel the darkness creep into his vision. What he sought was next to impossible, but Flint wasn’t going to let it overcome his emotions.
They were going to make a plan. Now all he needed to do was decide just what that entailed.
His stomach grumbled loudly, and among the snoring and sobbing, it sounded like a thunderclap. He’d been there three days and already he was feeling weaker. Once a day, the Watchers dumped some goopy substance through a tube into a trough, like they were cattle on a farm. Clark told him to be careful, because new people had been killed for eating too much –not by the Watchers, but by other humans.
Flint could believe it, judging by the looks in some of the captives’ eyes. A few of them wandered around talking to themselves, cursing anyone that so much as glanced at them.
He pushed a breath out and tried to find peace in his racing mind. Eventually, he found it, but the second he began to drift off, a loud bang erupted from the entrance to their pen. He sat straight up, investigating the source of the sound. Three Watchers had entered. One of them was holding his gun forward, the other two lazily sauntering after the frontrunner.
“What’s going on?” Flint asked Clark, who was perched on the bunk above him. His skinny legs flopped down off the bed to hang there, narrowly missing hitting Flint in the face.
“Forgot to tell you this part, I suppose. Every once in a while, they come and nab one of us. Could happen in the morning, at dinnertime, or in the middle of the night. We never know.” Clark’s voice was quiet, hardly more than a whisper.
“What happens to them?” Flint asked nervously.
“No one knows. They never return. Some see it as a blessing,” Clark said.
“How so?”
“The majority think they kill whomever they take. It might be better to die.” Clark’s legs disappeared back up top as he tried to avoid being noticed.
A blessing. People shouted out names of people they wanted the guards to take, as if the human names had any meaning to these large enemies. Flint lay down, trying to pretend he was sleeping, but kept an eye peeled on the lead Watcher. He moved with purpose, as if he knew where he was going.
A child cried out, and Flint nearly got to his feet.
Clark’s head poked down. “Do not engage,” he hissed at Flint before vanishing above again.
The Watcher grabbed a young girl, no more than ten years old, and began to drag her. A man screamed for them to stop.
“Take me! I’ll go! Leave the girl,” he pleaded. Anger boiled throughout Flint’s body. Could he sit idly by while this happened? He realized he didn’t have a choice, but he’d learn from this. He turned his attention to the other two guards, who still hadn’t reached for their weapons. They, like their friends across the Rift, had grown complacent here. Flint could use that. As the man shouted at them, Flint surveyed the entrance. He couldn’t see any other Watchers outside the door’s barrier. It was only the three of them. He could use that, too.
The girl had stopped screaming now, and the Watcher hit the man in the face with the butt of his gun while holding the girl’s arm. He motioned to the other two guards with him, and one of them kicked the man for good measure. A minute later, the three guards were gone, and with them the young child.
Flint rebuked himself for not being able to help, but he’d find a way next time. He’d find a way.
9
Wren
Wren was excited to hear what this Shadow had to say. Maybe the terrorist leader was tired of hiding and wanted this to end as badly as the rest of them. Wren hated to speculate, but she’d had little else to do in the days as they traveled toward Mars.
Her door buzzed. “Enter.”
Charles was there, right on time – probably to the second, knowing the android. “Good afternoon, Wren. It is good to see you,” he said, ever the gentleman.
“And you as well, Charles. Have a seat. Can I get you anythi…” She stopped herself, remembering a little too late that he didn’t eat or drink. It was hard to recall at times, given his disposition.
“I’m fine. I do have the details you were looking for, or at least what I was able to scrounge up.” Charles had brought a portable holotablet, and set it down on the table between them.
Wren’s heart was beating fast, her skin becoming flushed. She was so anxious to see what he’d found out about the Watchers’ prison camps that she couldn’t help but tense up. She doubted Flint was even alive, but she was trying to trick her mind to believe he was out there somewhere, okay and waiting to be rescued. They’d pulled off higher-risk jobs together; why not one last one for old times’ sake?
“What are you waiting for?” Wren asked abruptly. Charles jolted up in his seat. “I’m sorry, Charles, I’m a little on edge. I feel like we’ve been spinning our wheels while Flint’s out there.”
“I understand. Here’s what I found on the Interface. You should know most of the Interface is changed now, a feature the Earth Fleet has made so the Watchers don’t have access to anything that would help them win the war. Serina did give me access to the Fleet’s private server-driven data stream, though, and that’s where I found most of what I was searching for.” Charles tapped the tablet, and a 3D image of Titan appeared.
“They’ve occupied Titan. The Fleet has sent ships in, taken images, but they stopped when the Watchers caught on to the surveillance ships. The last round of spies didn’t make it back. They are presumed dead or captured.” The image zoomed in to show the dome that Charles and Wren had been under together after their daring escape from prison. “There’s an old Earth Fleet base on the colony, as there is on each moon or planet humans have expanded to. There are rumors the Watchers are using facilities in these bases to keep groups of humans.”
Wren thought about it. “What do the aliens want with us?”
“That is not clear. What does the Fleet want with Watchers on board the Grand Admiral’s carrier?” Charles asked.
“The Watchers want to know about us. Information to win the war. Perhaps they’re learning our language or doing biological tests on us. Or they’re creating their very own pathogen to take out Earth. There are so many things they might be doing.” Wren still felt a surge of hope, because if the rumors r
ang true, they were keeping people alive, and this fact increased the chances of Flint being alive. “What else?”
Charles switched to another moon, this one labeled Europa. “I learned that Europa is their largest base. From all Earth Fleet data, Jupiter’s moon has a large docking port station above it, and the Fleet estimates the following to be in inventory there: twelve warships, one hundred and forty fighters, two of what they call ‘Ruins’ for their sheer size and capability, and about twenty or so welded monstrosities they’ve created from various Fleet ships they’ve managed to obtain.”
“It doesn’t sound like much,” Wren said.
“It’s about a third of what they started with. The Fleet has even less at this point.” Charles zoomed on Europa, showing the region where the Fleet base was located.
Wren was surprised at the news about the size of the Earth Fleet. It couldn’t be. “Are you sure on those numbers for the Fleet? That isn’t many.” No wonder Serina had seemed so happy for their reinforcements and capable bodies. She had new fodder to throw at the war.
“They are accurate. While we have more things like carriers than the enemy, we have few fighters to house inside them. At this point, some of our ships aren’t much more than an idle threat when they meet in battle,” Charles said.
It made sense why they rarely skirmished at this point. Neither side wanted to lose any more of their already picked-off vessels. “What about Caliban?” Wren asked about the prison they’d taken over near Uranus. She shuddered at the thought of the prison. Maybe Flint was there.
“I don’t have much news on that front. The Watchers took it, but they use it primarily as a repair shop for their vessels. Shift drive maintenance and the like. There has been no reference to humans being held there.”
Wren considered this a small miracle. “If you had to put money on it, where would you guess Flint’s at now?” she asked her android friend.
Charles looked away. “If I had to guess?”
The Resistance- The Complete Series Page 58
