Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change

by Michael Kilman

  “Hey, buddy,” she transmitted directly to his suit.

  No response. There wasn’t any way to know if he was even still alive, let alone conscious. She could see out of the corner of her eye that the blood was beginning to stain the metal of her own EnViro suit. The white reflective lining would need cleaning later and her own symbols re-etched, but it wasn’t the first time. Her suit had been awash with plenty of blood over the last few decades.

  “Hey, I don’t know if you can hear me in there or not, but things are about to get real bumpy. I promise you aren’t going to like it, but if we want to survive this storm, it’s necessary.”

  A low and guttural response issued into her ears, “Was I supposed to like any of this?”

  Good, thought Miss, he still had a sense of humor; that was a sign he still had a fighting chance to survive.

  “No, you’re not, but this is going to be bad.”

  “Just do it.”

  “AI, prepare to disengage my storm sails, then wait till we've righted ourselves to re-engage them.”

  “As you wish, Miss.”

  “Prep yourself, Runner, on three, we go.”

  It was almost a shame to have to turn around, the sun setting behind the sandstorm was magnificent, and if her life weren’t in danger, then she would have considered lingering to watch the colors shift and change over the horizon. She sighed. Things in the Barrens were so rarely convenient and peaceful. If you tried to stop and smell the roses out here, you would end up dead.

  “1... 2... 3.”

  Gravity is a greedy mistress. It will jump on every opportunity it can to grab you and hurtle you as hard as it can toward the center of the Earth. Both Miss and the Runner dropped quickly without the support of the storm sail and Miss, despite all of her years of experience gliding through storms, was having a difficult time shifting herself around in that measly 4.5 seconds she had to save both their lives. She squirmed to turn the two of them but there was no use, it was just a little too much weight for her.

  After three seconds of fighting with gravity to turn her body and save both of them from being thrown face-first into the ground, she was only on her side. A little over a second remained, and even though time felt and appeared to be moving slow enough for her to shift everything, she knew with a panic-filled adrenaline that she couldn’t manage the turn on her own. Through her mind moved at the speed of light, she realized too late that she needed the Runner’s help to turn both of them, and she also realized that by the time she could say anything, they would both smash into the ground.

  2.

  What Miss didn’t realize was that harnessed to her was one of the luckiest men who had ever walked the Earth. The grim reaper himself stopped bothering to show up to 17’s near-death experiences because it usually left him rather disappointed and caused him to miss other more pressing appointments. 17 would tell you that he was just lucky, but Major John Daniels would say that he was unkillable. So far 17 had certainly been unkillable, and at that moment his instincts of self-preservation kicked in, and he indeed lived up to his reputation. Somewhere in the more unknowable reaches of the universe, the grim reaper once again sighed in frustration.

  3.

  Even though he knew it would cause him unbelievable agony from his open wound to do so, 17 recognized the moment they had begun falling that the harness they held them together was slightly off balance. He felt his left shoulder strapped a little higher than his right. To Miss, he knew that it probably felt like he was simply too heavy and she would continue to try and turn right instead of left. With all his strength, 17 twisted himself and Miss to the left until both of them spun around, now horizontal to the ground. Right as they faced the hard, rocky earth, the AI redeployed the storm sails. The updraft from the storm caught them and with only a few meters from the ground Miss activated her boosters, and they climbed higher.

  4.

  Miss heard a terrible scream of pain over her intercom.

  “Doing alright there, buddy?” asked Miss.

  “Alright? I don’t think that alright is the word I would use, that fucking hurt.” His voice was weak and gruff.

  “Well, better hurt than dead, right?”

  “Yeah but better not hurt than hurt.”

  “I take it you’re fully awake now?”

  “You could say that I hope to gods you have some painkillers and regen patches on you, I think I just tore my wound a new asshole.”

  “I have some first aid stuff. I’ll break it open as soon as we land.”

  “When is that?”

  Miss didn’t respond. Instead, she was getting a bearing on her current location in her heads-up display. The storm rumbled behind her, an earthy dark layer of clouds circling and rumbling, always threatening to swallow them both whole. But now Miss had superb control of the currents; there was no chance it would consume them.

  “AI, locate the nearest shelter for me, please.”

  “Yes, Miss.” It paused momentarily, reading the manually entered topography that Roderick and his followers had updated every few weeks to match the changing landscapes of their territory. “Miss, it appears there is a cave with sufficient depth to ride out the storm about 6 kilometers straight east of your position.”

  “Perfect, thanks, AI.”

  “You are most welcome, Miss.”

  Rocky had installed solar-powered boosters that would allow Miss to accelerate faster than storms when she went to land or sought shelter. They were solar fusion-based, and Rocky had manufactured them for her back at Atlantis base. However, the boosters had to be fairly lightweight to work, and so full fusion wasn’t achievable in their size. The boosters provided just a short burst of energy that accelerated her forward a few kilometers, but the catch was that they took about fifteen minutes to charge up fully in direct sunlight. They had just used them to escape smashing into the rocks, so they would only be partially charged when they went to land. This meant that they were going to have to make a run for the shelter.

  Miss examined the approach on her map. She had been to this cave on several occasions, and they would be able to land within 22 meters of the entrance, but it still meant that she was going have to de-harness the Runner early. Despite his wound and probably high loss of blood, he was going to have to run for the mouth of the cave.

  Miss explained the plan to the Runner.

  “I hope you have some good painkillers as a reward for my good behavior.”

  “Trust me, the shit I have will knock you right out while the regen patches go to work.”

  “Thank the gods for that.”

  Miss noted he said gods and not god. It was a good indicator that he might be interested in joining the COG. It was a rare day when a Christian or a Muslim joined the COG. There was just too much paganism in their worship of Gaia for their tastes.

  “You ready?”

  “No, my boots are soggy from blood, and I hate that squishy wet feeling you get when you have liquid in your boots.”

  Miss rolled her eyes; this one was a talker, but at least he wasn’t a total asshole. “When we hit that ground, just roll with the momentum and let it take you into a run. It’s your only chance to get into the cave before the core of the storm hits. 22 meters may not seem a lot, but when you're riding storms its kilometers long.”

  “Got it. Let’s do it.”

  Miss kicked up the boosters and spent every last bit of their energy. It had only given them a few hundred meters of space to work with, but so long as they both ran as hard as they could for the entrance to the cave, they would make it. She had survived narrow windows dozens of times before.

  “AI, when we are 2 meters from the ground, release the harness.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  They hit the ground hard. Both managed to catch themselves from the roll, and both ran for the cave, arriving just as the core of the storm touched their backs. Quickly they ran several dozen meters into the cave, the dust, and rock flying in behind them, grasping at them li
ke monstrous fingers.

  The Runner began to wince noticeably, his entire body beginning to shake with each step, but he kept walking until they were well away from the entrance and around several bends. Algae grew in the cracks of rocks. There was no trace of wind and oxygen levels were relatively breathable down here. It would be a good place to pull off the Runner’s EnViro suit and see to his wounds.

  Before she could ask him to remove anything, the Runner collapsed and lay still. Worried that he may have just died, Miss checked his vitals; they were extremely weak. Miss quickly took off her own EnViro suit and unpacked her med kit. She immediately injected him with painkillers and antibiotics to stave off any infection. Removing his suit without aggravating the wound proved difficult, but she managed to do so.

  She unwrapped one of the regen patches that she had brought with her in case Roderick had been injured. The patches could do a lot to heal bad wounds, but there was a limit to their effectiveness. There was no true substitute for an alcove. If you were hanging onto life by inches, alcoves could revive you fully, but the patches, they only stopped the bleeding and began regenerating tissue damage on the surface. They could heal a fresh bullet or knife wound fairly effectively, and even helped to dissolve bullets in the body and use the foreign matter to create additional tissue, but if the wound was too large, too deep, or the wounded had lost too much blood, they weren’t very effective. As she placed the patch on the wound, she noted that she had no idea how long the wound had been open. The patches were a roll of the dice.

  She laid the Runner’s unconscious body flat and took his EnViro suit apart to allow it to dry out. It would stink pretty bad later, but he would just have to deal with it. She wondered briefly what his designation was and looked on the bicep of the EnViro suit. The number was missing; either he had no number or it had worn off from age. She wondered how old this guy was and who he was. If he was from Manhatsten, had she ever met him?

  Her thoughts turned to Roderick again. Time was growing short now, and she would have to call off the search soon. She was sure that she could assume command and continue down the path he had prescribed to his followers, but to her, Roderick was a father figure, and so, until she was certain he was gone, she would push to keep searching.

  The search for Roderick had halted the main plan to reorganize after Langeles and attack the cities that descended upon the main ruins for salvage. If that wasn’t possible, they were to install a large number of agents in each of the cities to lay the ground for future attacks. Roderick would be furious when he had found that there had been quite a bit of delay in the plan, but he certainly wouldn’t do much more than threaten punishment. After all, he was the one who was missing.

  The key to attacking a city was the drills and the salvage trucks. When the drills were down, and the salvage vehicles were out in force, the cities were vulnerable. The drill was a huge power drain, and it took away the power requirements from some of the larger artillery defenses. It also took a great deal of time to disengage the drills and return to migration, which is why the security of each city had to watch so carefully for storms. Most cities could survive a moderately sized sandstorm without too much trouble, but a large sandstorm would cause serious damage. So far, no storm had ever destroyed a city alone, but it was certainly a tactic Roderick was willing to try.

  The big problem for the COG was the AI and its ability to defend the city. The AI was relentless. Sixty years previously, just before Miss had joined the COG, they had tried to take on Saud without addressing the AI issue. Roderick had lost half his men in part because the damned Rih were so highly skilled, but also because the AI managed to bring the big guns online much quicker than Roderick had anticipated. Despite the problem of getting past the system AI, Roderick was fairly confident that their trap in the Langeles ruins could at least cripple one city during salvage operations.

  With Manhatsten nearby, so many memories surfaced in her mind. It was true that there were many good memories, but her most recent memories of that city were awful. She had gone by another name once, but that seemed like a previous lifetime.

  She had only been a foolish teenager when the fates had caught up to her. That had not stopped the Supreme Justices from sentencing her and her friend to a life of slavery in the Runnercore. Anger swept over her, a deep and ancient anger that had lingered so long in her body that it was unlikely that she would know how to live without it. She vowed revenge, and when the time came to storm Manhatsten, she wanted to be on the front lines and kill those justices herself. Miss had a special place set aside on her bunk to notch in their names. It was the only space on her bunk that was left.

  Most nights, the horrific experiences of her first moments as a member of the Runnercore filled her dreams. Some nights she woke screaming, gripping the back of her neck, her sheets soaked with sweat. The chip they planted in the base of your neck, the horrible pain of having it inserted between your vertebra were among only the first of the terrible violations visited upon you. Then the muscle augmentation, training, and the long bouts of semi-sleep.

  All of that wasn’t the worst part though; the worst part is that if you failed to survive the training, they recycled you, turning you into a mindless drone that would perform menial tasks around the Runnercore docks for as long as they desired. That was the fate of Aaron. She cursed that damned book. For some reason Aaron’s body rejected the chemicals. So far as she knew, the poor bastard was still there in Manhatsten, unable to think or act for himself.

  Of course, no one knew what remained of the person when they were recycled, but Miss knew one thing, she wanted to end his terrible suffering. A bullet to the head or a knife to the throat was a mercy for him.

  Not for the first time, she had wondered about Jose. She had heard, through unofficial channels, of what that awful Senator had done to him. But considering what had happened to Aaron, he had gotten off light. There was a strange mix of love and bitterness in her heart for him. It was hard to think about him, about the feelings she had shared with him, without being angry. When she had told Roderick what had happened to the three of them, he had told her that Jose was welcome in Atlantis base once Manhatsten fell. Deep down she still loved him, still waited for him. She knew it was unlikely that he had felt the same way. It was likely he was already married, but she still had her faint hope. It was that tiny light of hope in her heart that kept her sane. It kept her from completely giving in to the rage.

  After training, they had put her in the alcoves for several months. When she was sent out on her first routine recon, she had encountered a storm. It was one of the largest sandstorms that anyone had ever encountered and neither of the more experienced Runners with her had survived. Through her quick thinking, she had turned her shelter into something akin to her first storm sail and had managed, just barely, to glide on the edges of the storm where the AI had indicated there had been a cave. She had broken her right leg and left arm in the process of gliding on that first storm, but she refused to let it kill her. She had crawled inside the cave and went as deep down as she could before falling asleep. When she had awoken, there was Roderick, standing over her. He told her about the Children of Gaia and of their need to destroy the cities in order to save Gaia. She eagerly agreed to join. She wanted revenge. What had happened to Aaron, and to a lesser degree, Jose, was unforgivable. Here was her chance. If she survived long enough, the COG would provide her with a chance to exact her revenge, end Aaron’s suffering, and liberate Jose from that terrible place.

  When she had told Roderick of how she had survived the storm, he was intrigued. He asked her if she thought she could sail on the storm again. Miss had replied that she thought it was possible if she had some sort of glider to work with, and so Roderick’s liberated engineer, Rocky, whipped something up for her.

  Miss had the AI deploy her shelter out of her EnViro suit. She deflated the shelter most of the way and used it as a kind of mattress to keep her a few inches off the rocky ground. It made for
a decent and semi-comfortable bed. Her thoughts turned to Jose, as they always did just before sleep and quickly, it claimed her.

  5.

  17 woke. He blinked, rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to recall where he was. Then he flashed back to the scene of all the bodies in Langeles and cringed. He recalled the fight with ‘Akif and his wound. Looking down, he saw that he was only in the suit undergarment and he reached down to check his wound. A medium-sized tear was in the fabric but the wound, at least on the surface, was gone. He remembered some other Runner picking him up, and they flew or something. Mostly, what he remembered was being jerked around a lot and then some kind of rough landing. The other Runner must have had regen patches.

  He scanned the room and saw the other Runner, and she was using her shelter as a pillow. 17 had used his shelter like that sometimes; it was the easiest way to keep from having to lay on jagged rocks. The first thing he noticed about this other Runner is that, beneath a layer of scars, she was beautiful. Her thick full lips and caramel skin betrayed her tough exterior.

  He decided not to wake her right away. Instead, he would learn what he could about his surroundings and his situation. He looked in vain for some indication as to what city she was from. He didn’t recognize her from Manhatsten, but that didn’t mean too much. It wasn’t like all the Runners knew each other. In fact, 17 would only recognize a few dozen. He looked at her suit carefully. She didn’t have any of the typical markings of Manhatsten on her suit. No black M with a red background or 0001 associated with Manhatsten’s city designation, but again, that didn’t mean anything. His suit and many of the older suits didn’t have the markings. The really strange thing though, was that she didn’t have a number of any kind on her suit. So far as he knew, every Runner, from every city, had a number on their suit. Except for him of course, his had worn off, and he had never bothered to request a replacement.