Raiders

by Malone, Stephan

  Julian swept his rifle left to right and back. He could see no Raiders in the scope’s glass. “Yeah let’s go!” He crouch-walked away from the barrier in a near-waddle until he reached another barrier, an overturned heavy table, probably from a nearby Pod.

  The soldiers of Polar City Six fanned out across the southern part of the City. They cleared living spaces, stores and shops, alleyways and the open common areas as they advanced. Their efforts were coordinated with the help of an unseen Greater Assistant artificial intelligence who was safely stored on Airship Two. General Christie had ordered the three airships airborne so they could safely hover and avoid the great Storm’s violent turn. There were no people on the Airship platforms of course. The Greater Assistant was on her own as she piloted the great ships just above the tropopause line thirteen kilometers into the sky, nature’s upper limit for Earthborne weather systems.

  “They’re on the run ma’am! We got about a quarter of the City cleared and secure!” A voice emitted from Bjørg’s cloth armband.

  “Okay Colonel,” she responded. “I’m right behind you. Keep pushing the squads forward.”

  “On it,” the voice said. By now only about three thousand soldiers remained, two thousand of which continued to advance Pod by Pod, shop by shop. They reached the Military Centre and passed it by for now. The entire substructure was completely abandoned. Veliosa and Venusia’s cores were stashed somewhere inside but the soldiers opted to continue their forward campaign. They would worry about the smaller details later.

  The soldiers encountered some resistance but these were the bold few who staggered behind the Raiders’ retreat and took a posited stand, mostly the ones addicted to synthmeth or some other nerve destroying stimulant.

  One Raider sprang up from a pile of stacked pillows and cushions in the main street’s right hand lanes. She roared something in Mandarin from her edentulous mouth and then lifted her Coilgun to Kama who was only about eight meters distant. The crazed woman faced their right flank. She kicked away a cushion as her external jugulars pulsed and gorged from her neck, paused to fire for a half-second when Kama twitched to the surprise. The Raider re-beaded her Coilgun against Kama’s head but then froze in place. Blood showered from her shoulder and neck, her body presently unresponsive to the interrupt of cerebral flow. She seized and collapsed where she stood, her leather-strapped Coilgun fired its final round into the pillow nest. Fibers and fluff kicked up into a micro-cloud as she fell, faa-poofff.

  Julian lowered his rifle, a smokey streamlet wafted from the barrel’s end. They stared at the ruined Raider for a moment while they recollected themselves from what almost could have been. Like so many of the others her body appeared almost impossibly perfect and strong although her face and arms were heavily cracked from synthmeth abuse, aged far too early. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, Julian thought. “Let’s go,” he nodded ahead. And they did.

  The three soon caught up with the mainline soldiers. After thirty minutes of advance they stopped in the City’s middle area, Centre Link. Hundreds of soldiers walked and surveyed the area. There were no living Raiders anywhere. Officers reviewed their tactical displays and issued orders to the splayed out troops. Soldiers emerged from the shops and Pods that lined the Centre Link’s circular lines. They shook their heads side to side in confusion.

  “Okay where are they?” Aurelia asked while she studied her face. Kama did not respond but looked above and below, left to right.

  She paused for a moment to consider things and then walked to the Bigstairs banister. Aurelia and Julian leaned against a sign nearby that was over a meter high. On its face it said Level One in an old world beige serif. As she looked to the lowest level Kama announced, “Down there,” and then proceeded down the stairs alone.

  Aurelia and Julian dashed to walk alongside her. Aurelia grabbed her arm and said, “What are you fucking crazy? Go down there by yourself? Christ,” she said, exasperated as she pointed her rifle’s barrel toward the stairwell below.

  Several soldiers noticed Kama’s descent and followed her. Before they knew it everyone proceeded down the Bigstairs. The lower levels were not nearly as extensive as Level One so for every landing small fireteams broke away from the massive spiraled ramp to sweep and clear each area. There were no Raiders to be found anywhere.

  Until they reached Level Seven. For the Polar City Six troops the experience was new but for the decanted people of the City itself it was all too familiar a journey to the bottommost realms of their once charm-blessed, hideaway world.

  And there they were, the remnant Jia Ting, about two thousand left alive or thereabouts. They mostly sat in place but a few stood. The ones who did stand up waited in a line two or three wide, the Great Elder at the head, his Chosen escorts to his left and right with their hands wrapped round his arms and to either side of them, two Temple Guard soldiers, easily identified by their silken-cloth Temple Wraps pointed their Coilguns at an inward angle toward the line’s lead position.

  “Freeze! Drop your weapons! Hit the deck!” A Sergeant and two infantrymen yelled out at the crestfallen and somber Raiders. But they did not. They said nothing and only shuffled slightly ahead in their line, eyes ahead and to the floor as if they were not surrounded by hundreds of Polar City soldiers. The transcendently beautiful Chosen women with their twice-braided hair and golden silk and leather-lined wraps stood abreast the Elder with saddened faces. Even in the gloomy and dim desaturated spaces of Level Seven the two Chosen women transmitted their dignified glow against the shadowline, their genetically selected bodies captured the attention of some soldiers as they landed onto that final place. It was not unlike running across two alien beings in an undiscovered cave, someplace far away.

  The Great Elder raised his right hand and made a circle and then a cross with his left in mid-air. He nodded and the two Temple Guards who flanked them shot at the two who stood at the head of the lost and shambled line, a man and a woman both. They fell into each other with a resigned thwump as the Coilrounds transversed their skulls.

  “I said drop your weapons! Now!” Someone yelled while hundreds of rifles aimed at the Elder and his assemblage. They ignored the calls, dragged the bodies to the side and three more Raiders stepped forward and stood before the Elder. Another circle waved with the right, a cross with the left and they too fell dead in the same fashion.

  Those who stayed behind in the Level Seven mega-cavern looked through the barrier glass, mouths open and in an evident state of sheer disbelief.

  And then someone shot the farthest of the Temple Guards. He fell onto the barrier glass to his right and slowly slid down its impervious surface. “God damn it people! Hold your fire!” the Sergeant yelled.

  The other Temple Guard turned her head to observe the hundreds of barrels and lights trained upon her and the other Raiders. She dropped her Coilgun onto the floor, produced an old world handgun from somewhere inside her silk and leather straps, pushed the iron thing against the soft underside of her jaw, and expressed the trigger down.

  Not a single Raider held any kind of weapon in their hands. They simply waited for their Elder’s blessing and then they would leave this stormblown, crippled world behind them forever. But now even that would be impossible as the Temple Guards lay inanimate at the feet of their Great Elder and his two Chosen women.

  A Raider stepped out from the line, his face painted over in lines of shock and despair. He said aloud, “My chosen, my chosen! You have fallen! Why are you with them? Betray us?” He scowled in Mandarin as he looked to Kama. She stood at the front of the soldiers’ line, about fifteen meters away.

  Kama responded to the Raider who had patiently waited for his death mere moments ago. She said, as tears welled up in his eyes even before she spoke, “My song.” she lowered her head, looked at her feet then raised it once more. “My song, I am not with them.” She waved her hand side to side to the Polar City soldiers. “They, they, my dear song, are with me.”

  The Great
Elder slowly walked from his station and into the empty space between the Raiders and the Polar City soldiers. He turned and faced his people as beams of light from rifle stocks shined toward him, raised his hands and flicked them to signal that his followers should also do the same. Some of the Raiders followed his suggestion while the rest simply sat in their places and lowered their faces. The Polar City soldiers cautiously stepped forward. A loud alarm sounded off. The glass barrier lit up while hundreds of lasers illuminated themselves around its perimeter line. It slowly lifted up and away with a stone-ground rub, two centimeters a second.

  Twenty Three

  Kama, Julian and Aurelia checked into a hastily deployed medical treatment bay that was set up on Level One. Julian had sustained a laceration to his left lower leg that he never noticed in the heat of combat. He was stitched up and sprayed with silvergel and then dressed with a wraparound gauze. Kama was more dehydrated than she had realized. She drank three hand bottles of juice laced with various electrolytes.

  They stopped over to Kama’s living Pod and rested for a short while. Raiders had tossed her personal belongings everywhere and most of the furnishings were either overturned, moved or used as fodder for barriers somewhere in the street outside. Aurelia fell asleep on Kama’s main-room floor from utter exhaustion. Julian couldn’t sleep however, so he lay next to her for a little while.

  “Where you goin’?” Julian asked Kama when she emerged from her bedroom. She had changed into civilian clothes. They were a utilitarian cut, leather and denim and unadorned with anything.

  Kama shook her head. “You really have to ask?” she said and placed her hands on her hips.

  “Right,” Julian said. He stroked Aurelia’s hair even though she was fast asleep. “He’s fine. I’m sure of it,” he said.

  “Try not to mess up the place,” Kama said and then laughed as she looked around at her Pod. The place had looked like some mythic giant had picked her little Pod house right on up from it’s foundation ties and shook it around in its hands, like a toy snowglobe.

  “Yeah, we’ll be careful,” Julian said and laughed with her. “Go,” he said as he waved his hand toward the door.

  Kama walked to Gate One, the Polar City’s main entrance. There were soldiers and civilians everywhere. The trip took longer than usual since there were so many bodies and debris all about the streets. The Storm had blown in a good pile of debris. There were tree branches from liberated blindscrubs that appeared to have been stabbed into the walls of the City, even two hundred meters inside. Outside there were only a few smaller trees that miraculously stood intact. Everything was a mess, even the Wall. The outer roads were virtually impassable by any vehicle save perhaps a Solarcycle. There were plenty of dead animals and birds as well. The affair was depressing to observe in its grand scale, Kama thought.

  She stumbled her way across the wreckage and made her way back to where the camp once stood. It was easy enough to find since the great Airships had descended back down to their original location. The camp was gone, buried in newly tossed rocks and trees and mud from the Storm. There were about twenty people who cut and dug away at the wrecked pileup. “Got one!” A rescuer yelled out as she shut off her lasing saw and grunted a tree trunk section from its nest. It rolled down the pile and thwunked itself to rest on the ground. She brushed the dirt from a survival pod which was not much more than a metal shell anchored to the ground with an impressively robust cable chain.

  A woman emerged from the survival pod, bruised and evidently rattled from laying inside the thing in two hundred and fifty mile an hour winds. The lid revealed that it was heavily padded on its inner surface but even the cushions were no match for the deadly forces that the Storm pushed in. She staggered up to stand, her knees slightly bent and hands poised out from her body. “You okay?” The rescuer asked as she picked her up bodily and carried her down.

  Kama shuffled through the mess as rescuers liberated one survival pod after another. Amazingly all their anchors held. They somehow drove spikes far enough into the soil and rock to lash them to the earth. She guessed that they must have somehow sent the pods from Level Seven down the mountainside and into the camp.

  And then she saw Dusty. He sprang out from his metal pod with a cartoonish anima with nobody in his immediate proximity to help him. “Woo hoo! Holy shit that was awesome!” He yelled out to nobody in particular as if he had just ridden the latest roller coaster ride in some ancient and lost amusement park from long ago.

  “Hey!” Kama vigorously waved her hands to Dusty who was about fifty meters away. He waved back and slowly descended the rubble-strewn pile. They hugged and kissed despite their shared exhaustion in the face of it all. “Here, you’re bleeding,” she said as she cupped the back of his head. “Hold still.” She ripped a piece of her undershirt and wrapped it around her right hand then pushed it to a cradle.

  “Thanks! Yow! Hell you missed a hell of a ride ya know!” Dusty smiled, his face and neck bruised and scraped everywhere. “I felt like someone pushed me down the side of a mountain in that thing!” He paused while she held the bloodflow down. “You okay baby?” he asked. “What happened to you in there? Did they hit you?”

  “No, I’m fine. Just try and hold still.” They shambled back to the Polar City gate. When they finally made it back to Kama’s pod, the two slept for almost an entire day.

  Twenty Four

  Four months passed. Polar City Three crawled its way back to a fair degree of normality but it would never be the same again. They removed the fallen and performed final burial ceremonies for the families of the lost.

  As for the remnant of the Jia Ting clan, the City governors decided to keep them both in the Level Seven keep but for the Raider leaders including what remained of the Elders, the Chosen women and Temple officers, they were kept inside the Military Centre away from the others.

  They discovered the cubes that once held Venusia and her twin sister Veliosa. The Raiders had drained their growing gel matricies. All that was left were two empty transparent cube shaped tanks, blue-green gel and fibers that spread across the black glass floor.

  For Greater Assistants could only be grown, not programmed much less synthesized. They slowly branched their pseudo-nerves out one microscopic thread at a time, the hairs fingered in all directions from the gel matrix center.

  Veliosa took seventy-three years to grow before she was even able to formulate her first word, which was, incidentally, plus. Her sister took seventy-eight years to do the same. Unlike a body-worn Personal Assistant, it was simply impossible to copy a Greater Assistants’ three dimensional matrix and store them somehow. They could only protect access but that was really all. The Raiders undoubtedly figured out that it was they who drove the last Gantry gun. So they ruined the twin girls into nirvana, forever, simply by shooting their tanks somewhere near their bottom.

  General Berg and Christie both deduced that the Raiders did not actually fall back or retreat, but instead they had attempted to regroup back at Gate Six to give them a little space between Christie’s front and themselves. They hadn’t counted on running smack into Berg’s second offensive from the northern entrance, so when they did the Raiders realized that they were trapped, outnumbered and outgunned even with their incredible technology in hand. So they went in the only direction that they could and that was down the Bigstairs.

  The great Airships flew at regular intervals between Polar City Six and home. They brought workers and fresh engineers and supplies and especially tools to help them rebuild and repair much of the broken City. Bjørg even offered to ship over professional social councilors who would help the survivors deal with their post traumatic stress. As for General Berg, he would fly the Airships back and forth with Bjørg between their two cities more often than not. Sometimes they would land in the wildlands when the weather cooperated, just the two of them.

  The Military Intelligence never figured out how the Raiders bypassed the Centre’s security so easily. It remains a mystery, ev
en now.

  Kama, Dusty, Aurelia, Julian, Mirabella, Calliope and even Ryan grew ever closer together as friends in the wake of the events they went through. The days passed and word spread around the City that Reso was eventually buried in the newborn sands, just as the weathermen predicted. All that remained of the once great culture of the Jia Ting, the descendants who were prophesied to be future progenitors of all humankind, genetically select supermen and women both presently resided inside the confines of Level Seven. They were supplied with whatever they needed but the Raiders were prisoners nonetheless. Still, it was more humane than sending them out into the Wastes once more, where they would have inevitably died away.

  The seven friends collected themselves together to go out. They heard that Club Fire was open for business again. But first, a stop along the way. They walked up to the cook at the old stir fry stand, outside the Military Center. He looked at them wide-eyed, presumably not used to such a large number of customers all at once. The cook nodded at the seven, smiled and then pushed a few tablespoons of sesame oil from a bottle onto the hot wok. The oil smoked and a grain of rice crackled away from the carbon steel surface in rebellion.

  Kama watched the old man happily work and it made her feel like nothing had ever happened, as if crisis and death never fell down around them only months before, and that it was just another day. The cook looked straight at Kama, straight in and said, “What you want?”

  She smiled, and then made her decision.

  THE END