EDEN (The Union Series)

by Richards, Phillip

  We followed the rail for several minutes, snaking through the valley, before I noticed something to my front. I held up a hand for the others to stop.

  It was a train, stopped just around a bend in the line. As Myers and I crept forward I could see that it had been attacked, for each carriage was riddled with dart holes, and the glass windows had been smashed through. Apart from the holes it looked pretty clean, as though it had only just been washed. I figured that it couldn’t have been there for longer than a couple of days. I supposed that the Loyalists had kept the maglevs going, using them to ferry their soldiers and equipment. They intended to keep the Bosque for their own after all, so there was no point in ruining the infrastructure.

  We patrolled past the train cautiously, scanning each of the carriages as we passed them. It looked as though a platoon of soldiers had opened fire on it at point blank range, peppering it with darts as it sped past. The train must have then lost power and fallen onto the rail beneath it, coming to a screeching halt.

  A couple of carriages were spattered with blood, and I had no doubt that I would find bodies if I went inside. I didn’t have to wait long before I found the first unfortunate passengers anyway. There were several of them, piled in a heap around the rear carriage.

  I stopped briefly to study the bodies. They were civilians - two men in their late fifties and an old lady, dressed in ordinary clothing. There wasn’t a drop of blood on them, though. As I stooped over them I noticed that none of them were wearing their respirators, instead the rubber masks lay on the ground beside them. Their mouths hung open, and their eyes stared blankly toward the sky.

  They hadn’t been shot, I realised. They had survived the attack on the train, but their attackers had captured them as they tried to make their escape. I imagined the three civilians gasping for air as their respirators were held tauntingly in front of them. Maybe they fought for a bit, struggling to get their masks back, but their killers would have just laughed as they lost their strength and quickly succumbed to the toxic air. Why waste a dart when Eden could do the work for them?

  I didn’t stop to chat with the section about what we had seen, instead I headed off again, leading them away from the train in search of a suitable location to break away into the forest.

  As I marched, I thought about the train, and the dead civilians beside it. The war in the Bosque seemed to have sunk to another new low. Had the Loyalists resorted to destroying everything as they withdrew, so that it couldn’t fall back into Edo’s hands? I didn’t know the answer, but I wondered if I would find the answer in Aasha village.

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  The Village

  The weather turned on us just after the sun set, the wind picking up as black, swollen clouds unleashed a torrent of rain down onto the valley below. We managed to approach the village without detecting even a single hint of activity, creeping right up to the edge of the forest. I crouched amongst the ferns as I surveyed the village, searching for any sign of danger.

  There was a small patch of farmland separating the village dome from the trees, looking as though it had been tended to recently; its crops were almost ready to harvest. The atmospheric dome had been made of some form of clear plastic, but it had collapsed, draping over the buildings like a badly assembled tent. It sagged in places as it collected rainwater, the plastic misting so that only the faint, darkened outlines of the buildings were visible. I could see where a maglev rail entered the dome through a large plastic airlock door - the same maglev line that had carried those civilians to their deaths.

  We continued to watch the village from the edge of the treeline, waiting to see if anything moved or stirred, but there was nothing. Not a single light or sound. The village appeared deserted.

  'You got anything?' I asked Myers.

  The trooper shook his head. 'The scanner isn't picking up anything. I don't think anyone's home …'

  ‘Doesn't look like it.'

  I walked around to Puppy’s fire team, spotting their helmets just above a thick cluster of ferns.

  'Freaky as fuck,' Puppy breathed as I crouched beside him.

  I nodded grimly. 'Yeah, I'm gonna take a look.'

  I hooked my arm around to the right. 'I'll move in from that side with my whole fire team. If I get contacted then I will need fire support from you to get back across the open ground. I should be back in two hours, but if I'm not, then wait another two before moving back to the platoon. This is pretty much our last chance to gain intelligence, the Boss will need whatever he can get for Dakar.'

  Puppy nodded, it was a pretty standard brief. As the recce protection group, he provided me with the cover I needed in case I was compromised, but there was always the danger that I could be captured. If that happened, then I was probably as good as dead anyway, and there was no sense in the other half of my section throwing themselves away as well. It was harsh, but it was the risk you took.

  'Any dramas?'

  He shook his head. 'No.'

  When I returned to my fire team I closed them all in, quietly briefing them on the plan. We would cross the farmland, using whatever cover we could find to reach the village safely. I intended to head for the maglev airlock, assuming that it would provide a weak point to allow us to force entry into the collapsed dome.

  'Everyone happy with what's going on?' I asked finally, and the two troopers nodded.

  'I'd be happier if it wasn't raining,' Myers said.

  'Wouldn’t we all,' I said gloomily. 'Follow me.'

  We broke out of the wood line, patrolling across the open ground, whilst trying our best to use whatever cover was available to shield our approach. There was no point in running, if anything that would merely make us even easier to spot.

  The rain is actually a godsend, I thought, as I followed along a shallow bund line. It rendered thermal vision virtually useless, especially considering the minimal thermal signature given off by our combats. The only way we could be spotted was by the mark-one eyeball or visual sensors, or by an active scanning device, which would be picked up by Myers’s own scanner long before it detected us.

  There was a line of small domes on the opposite side of the bund line, and I used them as extra cover, peering through the plastic toward the ghostly village. There was a slight whirring sound emanating from one of the domes - probably an air filter similar to the one in my respirator. I leant closer to see what was inside.

  Something squealed from within the tiny dome, causing me to fall backwards in surprise. I collapsed into the mud, legs flailing in the air.

  ‘Shit the bed!’ Myers hissed ducking down behind the bund line. ‘What the hell was that?’

  It was a pig, I realised with a wave of relief, as the animal grunted in annoyance. It tramped over to the far side of its dome, before making itself comfortable again.

  I cursed the heavens as I picked myself up from the mud, brushing wet earth away from my combats. We waited in silence beside the small domes, half expecting someone to emerge from the village to investigate, but no one came. I moved off again, this time avoiding the domes.

  The huge village dome loomed over me as I cautiously approached the maglev airlock. It roared as a million droplets of rain struck against its surface, pouring down to the ground like a waterfall. Like ghostly apparitions, the buildings beyond the dome were barely visible through the steamed plastic.

  'Spooky,' Myers observed.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  The maglev airlock was the only part of the dome that hadn't collapsed - the plastic door held rigid by a metal frame through which the train would enter. Beyond it was a long ribbed tunnel, made of the same clear plastic as the dome. Originally the train would have moved right into the tunnel, before the atmosphere was exchanged so that passengers and freight could be offloaded. It wasn’t a particularly elaborate airlock - it was simple and could be serviced easily.

  I ran my hand over the plastic airlock door. The material flexed easily, indicating that it wasn't too th
ick. I drew my bayonet and punctured the plastic. There was no alarm, no movement, and no shouting as I withdrew the blade.

  After a pause of several seconds, I returned my bayonet to the hole and sliced the plastic sheet open, creating a hole large enough for me to enter. Mist poured out from the gap, rapidly dispersing into the air, but still there was no sound from inside.

  I turned back to look across the open ground. My visor could only just identify Puppy's fire team in the pouring rain, their weapons scanning for targets to engage. If somebody was approaching then he would be forced to break net silence to alert me, and so his silence gave me some reassurance, that and the fact that Myers’s scanner remained silent.

  Pulling the plastic to one side, I stepped into the tunnel beyond, sweeping my rifle in search of targets. Myers followed just behind, snapping his rifle up as soon as he negotiated the hole, but there was nothing for us to shoot at.

  Dark and shrouded in mist, the village was like a graveyard. The atmospheric dome hung right down in between the buildings, weighted by building pools of water that threatened to rip through it. The streets were deserted, the lights were out, and the windows were black. It was like a ghost town.

  'I don't like this ...' Myers sounded nervous.

  I spared him a quick glance as I stabbed my bayonet into the plastic wall of the tunnel. I didn’t like it either, but said, 'I don't think there's anyone around.'

  'Not alive, anyway ...' Skelton added.

  I smiled darkly. 'The dead can’t hurt you. It's the living you need to worry about.'

  I ripped my bayonet through the plastic and stepped into the village.

  The three of us fanned out into a narrow street flanked by two-storey houses, our weapons trained onto the blackened windows and the dark alleyways that ran between them. The roof had sagged between the buildings so that it left only just enough room for us to move down the street without having to crouch.

  I waved my hand downward and we each took a knee, waiting again to see if somebody noticed our entry to the village. For several minutes we waited, watching, listening and scanning for any sign of life. It was strangely cold inside the dome, almost colder than it was outside.

  Myers was right, the village was seriously spooky. Despite the roar of the rain pounding on the roof above us, it had an eerie silence - no - a stillness about it that was altogether haunting. Something terrible had happened in that village - something so awful that it had somehow sunk into everything around it. I remembered the murdered civilians by the train, and shivered.

  ‘Anything on the scanner?’ I asked in a whisper.

  Myers shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes away from the windows. ‘No.’

  ‘OK. We don’t have time to check everywhere, so we’ll do a quick lap of the village. Identify anything that stands out to you, then once we’ve done the lap we’ll have a quick chat and have a more detailed look at areas of interest. Happy?’

  The two troopers nodded.

  We set off around the village, negotiating the collapsed roof as we searched for anything of interest. We crept through alleyways and along tunnels formed where the plastic had dipped right down to the ground, swollen by rivers of rainwater that ran along its length. I began to notice that water was pouring through holes punched in the plastic, forming growing puddles on the ground at our feet. Some of the holes were far larger, as though somebody had attacked the roof with a knife.

  Something had detonated above the village, most likely an artillery shell, with the intention of collapsing the dome and showering the inhabitants in shrapnel. It would have caused mass panic as the filtered air rapidly escaped into the atmosphere, sending people running for shelter in their homes, sealing their doors and donning their respirators. There were signs of shrapnel damage to the buildings, confirming my theory, and all of the doors had been left open.

  After completing our loop we arrived back at the maglev airlock, closing back together to discuss what we had seen and any areas we wanted to investigate further.

  ‘The village was hit by artillery,’ I whispered as we huddled together, ‘and by the looks of it everyone ran.’

  ‘The Loyalists must have done it when they attacked the village,’ Skelton decided.

  I nodded slowly. ‘Maybe, but I don’t remember artillery. It looked to me like they were trying to capture the village, not destroy it.’

  ‘Perhaps they bombarded it when they heard the Guard were coming, then killed the civilians in the train as they tried to escape.’

  ‘Makes sense.’ I turned to Myers. ‘Still nothing?’

  ‘Not a blip.’

  ‘OK. I want to look at the buildings in the centre of the village, maybe try and find out what happened here.’

  Myers looked nervously back into the dark cluster of buildings. ‘I’m not sure I want to know what happened here.’

  The centre of the village was almost pitch-black, and visibility was made worse by lack of thermal imaging due to the ‘thermal crossover’ - a time in the day or at night when everything achieved a similar temperature.

  Skelton patted my shoulder gently, stretching his arm to point at something on a building across the street. I turned to look, trying to see what it was that made the building stand out to him.

  ‘Wires,’ he breathed.

  I squinted, finally spotting a series of black cables that ran out of the nearest wall of the structure, joining and crossing over each other until finally they formed a great bundle at the roof. There they connected onto some kind of metal pole that looked completely out of place in the village, as though it had been bolted onto the building long after it was built. I recognised it instantly … it was a military communication mast.

  I crept up to the side of the building, taking my place beside the door whilst the other two troopers stacked up, Myers in front of me and Skelton behind, so that we were almost touching each other facing the door. We would enter the room as one, bringing all of our weapons to bear at once. With no idea what to expect inside the building, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I leant slightly outward from the wall, peering in through the doorway. The door had been left slightly ajar, though I still couldn’t see much inside. I reached out and squeezed Myers’s shoulder, indicating that we were ready.

  In one fluid, practiced movement, we stormed into the building, fingers poised over our power-up buttons as our weapons swept the room beyond. The only sound was that of boots scuffing wooden floor boards and our own breathing.

  The walls of the room were covered in wires and cables, running through holes drilled out of the floor and the ceiling, but otherwise it was empty. We quickly cleared through both levels of the building, searching as we did for anything else to reveal its purpose. The cables ran through two floors, before they finally exited through a hole cut out of the ceiling so that they could join onto the mast outside. The furniture had been moved out of the rooms containing the wires, and stacked together into a single room where there were signs of soldiers having been there. Thermal sleeping bags were left out on the floor, and kit lay scattered as if the room had been left in a hurry.

  ‘What was this, then? What was this building for?’ Myers wondered, as he rooted through the equipment that had been left, in search of anything useful.

  ‘An antennae,’ I replied knowingly, ‘for something dug under the ground.’

  Skelton looked surprised. ‘There’s a warren under here?’

  ‘Must be. The wires come straight out of the ground.’

  He looked down at the scattered equipment. ‘So who was staying here, then?’

  ‘Guards,’ I said, ‘protecting the wires.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘The people living here.’

  Skelton shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. Are you saying the Loyalists took the village, then dug themselves in underneath it and actually let the people stay here?’

  ‘It’s the perfect protection, exactly the same as in Dakar,’ I explained. �
��They know that the Union can’t drop bombs on Edo civilians, so where better to centre their assets? The people of this village were a human shield.’

  ‘Wow!’ he exclaimed. ‘I bet the villagers loved that!’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made much of a difference to them,’ I said, remembering my conversation with Yulia on the far bank of the Ghandi. The people of the Bosque just wanted to live, they would accept their new masters just as they had accepted being ruled by Edo.

  ‘So what happened?’

  I looked at the discarded items left by the Loyalist guard force. Rations, drinking water, even ammunition were thrown about the floor like rubbish. The soldiers that had lived there were clearly poorly disciplined, leaving such equipment lying around when it should be permanently packed in their kit and good to go, but there was no doubting that they left in quite a rush.

  ‘The Presidential Guard were coming,’ I deduced, ‘so they made a run for it.’

  ‘Check this out,’ Myers said, as he held something up for us to see. ‘A magazine!’

  I frowned. ‘Put that down, you idiot!’ I hissed. ‘You know better than to pick random things up!’

  The young trooper dropped the magazine as if it burnt his fingers. ‘Sorry. I was just trying to point out that it was an Alliance mag - Loyalists don’t use Alliance magazines, they don’t fit their weapons.’

  I looked down at the magazine and sighed. ‘Well I suppose if it was going to blow up, it would have done so by now.’

  I crouched down and picked it up, turning it over in my hands. It was indeed an Alliance magazine. It was also empty, I could tell by the weight. Like our own magazines, they came pre-loaded, and once they had been used they could be thrown away. We never did so ourselves, keeping them so that they could be swapped for fresh magazines and used again, but the Guard probably wasn’t so disciplined.