Raiders

by Malone, Stephan

  Calliope jumped on and held tightly onto Julian while Kama and Dusty mounted their craft with Revon and Mirabella on their bike as well. Revon ignited the Solarbike to life and then flicked the tractor mode active. The other three bikes automatically started up and the dynamic camouflage washed over them all.

  Mirabella let go of Revon’s now invisible waist. “Holy shit! Where are you?”

  “Don’t worry you’re fine now hang on!” Revon expressed with pressured voice. He twisted the throttle full on and the Solarbikes swooshed away just as the Raider mob broke through the thinned smoke line. Mirabella turned to look behind and shuddered at the sight. She clung onto Revon with crush-hug severity. The Solarbike train flew to the bridge’s southern foot. Revon carefully navigated around the holes on the bridge’s deck. The other bikes precisely followed suit as the bridgeman’s body lay lifeless to their right.

  They were through.

  Dusty said, “Never thought I’d see you again,” as the blindscrub branches swished at their sides. Kama said nothing but reached back with her left hand and scrunched his forearm for a second.

  They traveled for another fifteen kilometers until Revon was satisfied that there was enough distance between them and the Raiders. He stopped them inside a cleared out area pocketed far inside the forest. Everyone dismounted their Solarbikes.

  Nobody had words to say while they rested. Faraway they could hear faint sounds of the Raider city. It was eerie that the noises defiantly traveled so far. Aurelia thought she heard the underslung hum of a vehicle perhaps, maybe a gunshot or two but she really didn’t know. The sounds were reflections of long removed echoes and were too diluted and abstract to be defined.

  Aurelia broke the silence. “I got a hold of the General on neutrino radio while you guys were in. He’s sending the JMR seventy-seven to pick us up.”

  Mirabella asked, “What’s that?”

  Aurelia said, “It’s our one and only transport helicopter.”

  Calliope said, “Helicopter? Wait, we have a helicopter?”

  “Yeah, it’s our only one though. For the whole City,” Aurelia responded.

  “I don’t understand. Why didn’t they send you in the helicopter to begin with?” Mirabella pointed to the cluster of Solarbikes. “Instead of those?”

  “I don’t know.” Aurelia looked to Revon who stared out into the forest. “Revon, what do you think?”

  Revon simply shook his head and shrugged. “Maybe the seventy-seven isn’t reliable enough or somethin’. Hell if I know.” He turned his head back to the forestline. “I’m sure General Berg had his reasons.”

  “Where’s Dusty?” Calliope asked as she looked around. Nobody answered. Kama and Dusty slipped away unnoticed by anyone.

  “Probably just talking,” Julian said and winked at Calliope who appeared to be nettled at the thought.

  Kama stopped and looked at Dusty. “I think we’re far enough,” she whispered.

  Dusty squinted into the woods and said, “Think so?”

  “Yeah,” she said and then kissed him. He kissed her back as they fell onto the earth. Slowly, gently down, the leaves and treetwigs long since orphaned from their parent crackled in response to their fall almost as if the dead detritus welcomed their primitive energies. As the forest rose to them Kama rumpled herself on top of Dusty while he lay, rough and ripe and oily from the Reso prison hold.

  For a while they just kissed. Kama’s banded blonde hair waved against the slivered sunlight which cast themselves in radial coronation past the canopies above.

  “You have no idea,” Kama whispered with a breath, “How I missed this. You.”

  Dusty worked at her battlegear while she helped him. He removed his shirt, a prisonworn rag of a thing that easily ripped against their efforts. They rolled so they faced one another sideways. A hoary redpoll fluttered over them. It flapped and squawed against the two intruders, these silly hairless animals. Kama rubbed him for a minute while they kissed. He stroked and massaged the small of her back with one hand and clutched the back of her head with the other. He lowered his head onto her bosom and then kissed her breasts while she rubbed him some more. She guided him into her and they entwined their tongues against one another while they slowly moved in attenuated motions.

  A thornsharp branch wriggled its way past their bed of armor somehow and jammed itself into her right arm. She bled just a little but didn’t even notice or care as an orgasm waved over her. Rushed, sustained, and then a shout from the forest.

  It was Calliope. “Guys where are you!” She belted into the forest blind. “Hey!”

  Dusty looked at Kama then snickered out a smothered laugh, almost a giggle. Kama did the same. For a few minutes they only looked at each other there on the forest ground, the hoary Redpoll surrendered her protestations at the humans’ sacrilegious presence and safely observed them from a branch far overhead.

  “Hello? Hello! Dusty?” Calliope volleyed.

  “Calliope, were fine!” Kama yelled over her shoulder. Her request did not do any good, however. Calliope somehow scrambled to them and then stared at the two. “What, Calliope?” Kama asked.

  Calliope said, “Revon wants us to get moving. Come on.” She turned on her heel and then walked back to the others in a huff.

  Sixteen

  General Berg dragged smoke from his pipe. “Congratulations guys. Great job on getting them out. It's good to see you all home in one piece.”

  Revon said, “Thank you General. The airlift home helped.”

  Julian said, “Solarbikes are great sir. But seriously after five hundred mi-.”

  The General interrupted him and raised his hands. “I understand. Deploying the JMR helicopter was risky though. Damn thing’s an unreliable relic. Barely airworthy but after Aurelia’s message we felt it was the only real option.”

  “We could’ve made it back with the bikes,” Revon said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Who knows. There was a good chance you might have been sacked,” General Berg said.

  “But were already twenty kilometers outside of Reso sir, when you picked us up!” Julian replied.

  “You know that forest that you guys passed through?” The General asked.

  “Yeah, so what?” Aurelia replied.

  The General spoke into his Personal Assistant band on his arm. “Venusia, display sector twenty-five twenty-six, enemy overlay.”

  A female voice responded from unseen speakers built into the meeting room floor. “Sector twenty-five twenty-six, Reso northwest ten. Showing targets in red.” An oversized transparent map of the area just north of Reso glowed to life from a single dot in mid-air.

  “Draw the travel path of the rescue team,” Berg said.

  “Rescue team not identified, defaulting to last rescue operation approved,” Venusia responded. A jagged black line rendered across the holographic map. On either side were hundreds of dots, all red.

  Berg said, “See? We didn’t get this data back until you actually reached Reso. The Solarbikes had sensors that cluster-mapped this intel. Now we have new information. Got some new pictures from the survey drones we sent out.”

  “Drones, sir?” Julian asked.

  The General ignored his question and said, “Venusia, give us a slideshow of the last drone data please. The good ones.”

  Venusia responded, her voice resonated an impressively natural cadence despite its synthetic origin. “Drone image eight fifty-six, composited.” Presently a three meter panoramic picture displayed over the conference table. It revealed a wide forest-line with a huge mob of people about a half-kilometer across.

  Aurelia stood up to inspect the image in further detail. There were thousands of them, tiny specks that were loosely grouped but alarmingly large in number. The crowd disappeared beyond the image's topmost border. “Holy shit that looks like all the Raiders just up and left Reso! Where the hell are they goin'?” Aurelia said.

  General Berg only stared at the image.

  “They’re, they�
��re not coming here, right? On foot? Come on!” Julian speculated.

  “Yes,” Berg responded. “We think so.”

  Aurelia walked through the image’s right and said, “That’ll take what? A month to get here?” She waved her arms in exasperation. “Okay any idea why?” She turned back round to look at the oversized image once more. “They can’t be this worked up over the rescue.” Aurelia paused. “I mean, can they?”

  “Kama shot an Elder,” Berg said.

  “Big deal!” Aurelia said. “Excuse me sir, sorry but they really care that much about one Elder? I thought there were twelve of them!”

  “Well they care about something. Whatever the reason, they’re coming. They’re coming here.” The General’s face seemed to puff out a little.

  Julian asked, “How many sir?”

  Berg responded, “About one hundred and ten thousand of them.”

  Brigadier General Olga Nelsaris interjected, “We will make a city-wide public service announcement and debrief the whole Military over the next forty-eight hours. They’ll be at our outer defenses in about four weeks. The time is now to prepare.”

  “Why are you telling us before anyone else knows?” Aurelia asked.

  “Aurelia you are the first to know for one reason alone. The public simply cannot learn about Kama’s assassination of that Elder. What was his name?”

  Nelsaris said, “Nebu, sir.”

  “Yes, Elder Nebu, thank you Brigadier. We’re doing this to your benefit.”

  Aurelia slammed her fist on the table while she stood and faced the General. “It’s always with her, sir! This shit always starts and ends with her! Why do we keep putting up with this crap? She’s like a rolling train wreck, and now the entire Polar City is in jeopar-!”

  General Berg’s face reddened as he smacked his pipe onto the table. “Listen! You’re out of order! Do you hear me? What you don’t seem to understand is that if it weren’t for Kama we never would have known about the Jia Ting invasion! They would have showed up at our front Gate eventually and our City would be lost! We never would have had time to prepare for such a massive invasion force.”

  “What?” Aurelia recoiled for a second. “What makes you think that they were gonna try and capture our City?”

  “Because Kama told us that was what they were going to do.”

  Aurelia shook her head in resignation. “Oh! Oh yeah, she said it so it must be true! Is that it?”

  “Does it make any sense to you, Aurelia?” General Berg returned. “All those recon missions, the sneaking around our City border?”

  “What?” Aurelia said.

  “If you never survived and fought as well as you did, we never would have captured Kama. But things happened in our favor. The City owes you a great debt for your heroic fighting, but we also owe Kama a lot here. Thanks to Kama we are so far ahead of the game. Her information probably saved this City.”

  Aurelia relaxed her agitated state.

  “Look. Kama’s not your enemy.” Berg abstractly pointed to the drone's image. “They are your enemy. And they’re coming! They want to take our City from us! Why? We really don’t know.”

  “Weather, sir,” Nelsaris offered.

  “Weather, Brigadier?” Berg said.

  “Yes, weather. Our meteorologists observed that their climate zone is slowly changing into semi-arid, sir.”

  “What exactly does that mean in English?” Berg asked.

  “That part of the continent is turning into a desert, sir,” Nelsaris said. “Our climate here is humid continental. It's stable.”

  Berg continued. “Thank you for the insights, that's something to think about but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re coming for us! We need to get the City locked, defensed and prepared in thirty days! Every living soul must be ready.” The General picked up his pipe. “Everyone.”

  Three weeks passed. The people of the great Polar City Three prepared themselves and their families for the Raiders who slowly approached, every second another step closer. Airborne drones were flown out to monitor the horde’s progression. Their reports were never good.

  Zeroday. When the Raiders would be knocking on the City's front door.

  As the days went by everyone in the Polar City prepared for the Raiders arrival. “The Raiders are genetically modified descendants of government programs long abandoned. They leave their dead behind, unburied,” Veliosa announced through the City’s public information channel. “As you see by this diagram here they are now five hundred kilometers away” she continued. “It is important to remember that all Citizens must wear carboncloth armor which we will issue from the Military Centre.” Veliosa produced a map that showed the Military Centre’s location within the City onto screenwalls everywhere, starred. “All Polar City Citizens must complete the mandatory firearm training session. Please see or message your Community Leaders for times and locations near you.” A civilian issue Defense rifle holographed itself over the screenwall surfaces.

  Veliosa intelligently assembled informational updates based upon datasets given to her. She created presentations and pushed them Citywide, twenty-four hours a day nonstop. She was a Greater Assistant, more robust and organic than a small bodyworn Personal Assistant at the expense of computational power.

  Veliosa and Venusia were twin sister Assistants. Together they could perform eighty-nine trillion instructions per second on a mere hundred watts of energy. Venusia specialized in military logistics while Veliosa was grown to solve the civilian tasks of the day.

  They were a hundred hours away from Zeroday which was a little more than four days. General Berg assembled his officers in the Situation Room deep within the Centre’s core. “Venusia, how are doing?”

  The semi-transparent avatar of a woman appeared in the large oval shaped table's center. She stood about three meters tall, large enough for everyone to see, even from the outer rows. “Auto-cannons are all online and field ready excepting guns sixty and sixty-two.”

  “What’s wrong with those?” Berg asked.

  Venusia displayed a wireframe representation of an auto-cannon. “These were the guns that were hit by the Raiders during the recovery operation. I am having trouble locating several components to raise them to a ready state.”

  “Can Veliosa help you?”

  Venusia's sister rendered next to her. Her avatar was also three meters tall. Veliosa appeared as a blonde woman who wore a worker’s jumpsuit and a worker’s cap. It was an odd aesthetic decision but then again who would argue? Venusia spoke while her sister remained silent. “Yes I did and Veliosa has a provisional solution in place. She will have the parts printed out if we need to.”

  “Why don’t you just print them out now? We only have a hundred hours. We need those guns online now!” A lieutenant yelled out from the officers’ gallery.

  Venusia and Veliosa both turned their oversized avatars to the lieutenant. “Lieutenant the parts need to be of high density material. Printed parts will work but the auto-cannons will fail after only minutes of operation,” Venusia responded.

  “Can’t we just machine them by hand or something?” another officer said.

  Veliosa responded with a frown. “I was unable to locate an alloy anywhere in the City that can be used to coat them. Making them by hand would only be a lesser solution than printing them. These parts have to be resilient enough to handle the torque the super-servos impose upon them.”

  “Thank you Veliosa. Venusia what about the deployment solutions for our defense?” General Berg asked.

  A large semiclear rendering of the entire City rotated in front of the sisters. Venusia spoke. “I have inserted three hundred and twenty-five auto-guns to supplement the auto-cannons. I have placed them at intervals of fifty meters on the Wall's City-side face. They will be pointing toward the City in general. The auto-guns are predicted to be much harder for the enemy to take down.”

  Excellent work Venusia. Anything else?” Berg asked.

  “I have placed altern
ating auto-gun batteries near the Gates. They will be assisted by the manual nests.”

  General Berg said, “Thank you. Venusia, have you run a theatre-wide emulation for us?”

  “Well General,” Venusia paused and then looked down to her semi-transparent legs for a second. “No. It is difficult for me to synthesize how effective our defense will be.”

  Murmurs and whispers washed across the Situation room. General Berg raised his hands and waved them down to quiet everyone. “Can you tell us why?”

  Venusia looked at her holographic sister then turned to Berg. “Yes General, I can. We don’t know how well our defense will be because we do not accurately know nor can we predict how many Coilguns the Raider enemy will be carrying. We know that they are concealing the weapons but it is impossible to know how many with any degree of certainty.”

  The General asked, “Can you show us a run if say half the Raiders have Coilguns?”

  “Of course,” Venusia responded. Venusia and Veliosa’s avatars disappeared from the table and were replaced by a large overlay of the City. “The Raiders will probably attempt to attack all the entry points that is to say the Gates split up into groups of twenty thousand per Gate.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Berg said.

  The three dimensional wiregraph of the City blinked with tiny bursts of light to simulate the auto-cannons as they fired away. Small orange and green squares represented the ground troops and smaller ordnance. Thousands of tiny red dots each signified a single Raider as they swarmed into the choke points.

  Venusia continued her narration. “With ten thousand Coilguns per entry point the auto-turrets will probably go offline after about three hundred hits to the main linkages. By then their numbers will be reduced to about six thousand Raiders per Gate.”

  “What about the soldiers on the line out there?”

  “We will have to pull them back just before the auto-turrets fail. A window of about six minutes. The Raiders will fire thousands of Coilrounds per second at the auto-turrets but only three hundred have to penetrate the armor. The hit rate will be about a thousand failures to one successful penetration. But with three hundred hits any of the turrets will mechanically fail,” Venusia explained.