A secondary explosion erupted on the opposite side of thirty-seven’s facility, near the buried power conduits that supplied the auxiliary power, now destroyed.
“Uh-oh,” the staff member said. “Redundant systems failing.” She turned around to Crusoe with panic in her eyes. “systems down, sir…”
“Any comms coming from within?” Crusoe said as he viewed the structure with his binoculars. A few surface patrols were already responding.
“Nothing sir,” another staff member said. “Interference on the other end, nothing coming out.”
“Jesus…” Crusoe muttered. “Thirty-Seven is practically all gangers from Wargame’s outfit. Psychopaths…” Crusoe turned around to look at his control staff staring at him after hearing his words. “What are you looking at me for? Somebody find out who’s hitting us! Put the fireteams on standby!”
“Yes, Warden!” they said in unison.
***
A wargame ganger pounced on top of a guard and bashed his fists against his face repeatedly until he drew blood. The cell blocks were an outright blood brawl. The gangers of Earth cared little of good behavior and were nothing more than animals to the guards.
Just as the ganger tried to deliver another blow, he was blown backwards by another guards CREP blast, sending the ganger skidding into a nearby wall. The guard picked himself up just as another ganger came running at him with his fist cocked.
The guard was able to pick up his numb-rod from the ground and sent a commanding swing across the ganger’s face, sending a stasis charge through the ganger causing his body to go limp. The guard wiped the blood from his face and scurried his way back to a line of guards forming by the nearest doors.
The brawl was escalating as more and more guards were falling due to the overwhelming inmates. Several of the less-than-lethal weapons were being pried and taken from the guards. But the weapons wouldn’t kill their targets, and the gangers wanted blood.
Another ganger slammed a guard against the wall. The guard struggled to bring his CREP pistol up to the ganger’s head, but his arm was being held down. The two of them struggling for dominance. The ganger grinned psychotically as he jammed his forearm into the guard’s neck. A moment later, the guard’s arm snapped in two, making him scream as the immense pain overwhelmed him. The ganger snatched the pistol from the limp arm and shoved the barrel in the guard’s mouth, his eye’s glistening from the blue aura of the weapon’s barrel.
“Time to go beddy bye!” the ganger said as he pulled the trigger. The guards head exploded in a mess of pink mist and red matter. The ganger screamed in laughter and sick happiness before he was struck with a CREP charge from across the room by another guard.
Tariot and Ricketts watched from their cell as dozens upon dozens of inmates and guards kept the fight raging.
“Not good, not good!” Tariot said. Ricketts could only smile as he saw blood on the floor and guards’ bodies dropping one by one.
“What’s the matter, doctor man?” Ricketts chuckled. “Don’t enjoy the show?”
Tariot backed up to as far as he could in the cell, fearing the barbaric gangers just as much as being beaten by a guard.
“No need to fear us, Doctor slicer, just as long as you don’t get in our way when we leave this ice cube.”
“Leave?! How the hell do you plan to accomplish that? They’re probably sending teams right now to gun us all down!”
A ganger flew across the door to the cell, skidding across the ground, and cracking his neck on landing. A guard in a power suit started working his way through the gangers; punching and stomping on as many inmates as he could before being jumped by multiple gangers.
The powerguard tried to wrestle them off and managed to grab one on his back and crush his neck. Another ganger bit the guards exposed neck sending blood flowing onto the armor, finally collapsing the guard.
“There’s a landing pad not too far from this building, I seen it meself when I came on the skybus.”
“You’re a pilot, then huh?” Tariot said as he saw the carnage outside. He wasn’t too comfortable with the violence outside considering he didn’t know whose side he was on. “Well, my mistake. And here I thought you guys were dumb gangers…”
Ricketts stared off into space, trying to strategize his next move, or rather, three moves from where he was standing seeing an inevitable roadblock.
“You can’t fly, can you?” Tariot said.
“I can learn me a ship!” Ricketts said pridefully as he snapped his head back outside of his cell.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Tariot exclaimed as he made his way closer to Ricketts. “It just so happens, I can fly, Ricketts.”
Ricketts became nervous when he thought of his plan. He wasn’t a pilot. And even though he lacked the education of a 5th grader, he knew he wouldn’t get far in a ship.
“You ain’t hard enough, Doctor Slice,” Ricketts said.
“That’s what you’re for. You rally up your boys here, I can get us out of here. Cherry on top? I’ve got credentials stored on the InfiNET from my last job that can get us to Ganymede, Windfire City, Earth even. You get me to a ship, I can get you to wherever you want to go!”
Ricketts saw the last of the guards in the block get overtaken by the gangers followed by the signature war cries of Wargame’s sadistic gangers.
“War!” the gangers cried.
Ricketts smiled as he saw the first hurdle overcome. He stepped outside of the cell and looked to his comrades, smiling at them.
“Boys!” Ricketts shouted. “Grab what you can off these bulls. We’re headed back to paradise!”
“War!”
“Come here, Doctor Slicer.”
Tariot shuffled out of the cell, carefully stepping over the bodies. The other gangers could tell he was out of his element. If you showed any signs of squeamishness, you were inferior in their eyes, but this case was different.
A guard groaned beneath Ricketts feet, trying to stay conscious and startled Tariot.
“My boys, this is our savior tonight!” Ricketts said as he held up Tariot’s arm. “This is our pilot! You protect him with all your cunning or I’ll gut your stomachs with my fist!” Ricket’s boot came crashing down on the guard’s neck, snapping it in two.
Just then the emergency PA system kicked on, originally meant to give evacuation messages and the like with whatever little power was left, this time being used to give a very specific message. The screeching of the opening interference was enough to catch the gangers’ attention.
“To the inmates of Wing Thirty-Seven,” Crusoe’s said over the speakers. “This is your warden speaking. You will not hear any deals or offers for your lives. For those who value your lives, step into your cells and lay face down and await further instruction.”
Tariot glanced to his left and right as the gangers were fixated on the speakers and began to inch his way back to his cell before Ricket’s hand thudded on his shoulder, bringing him closer.
“For those of you that wish to meet unholy judgement, that I can only guarantee will be fierce and with no regard to your promised sentence, stand your ground.”
Ricketts smiled from ear to ear as he looked to his other gangers who were doing the same. The gangers of Wargame’s ranks were high on battle and death, their drugs being cortisol and blood.
“War!” they all shouted. After their lungs settled, they eagerly awaited a response from the speakers and after a few moments, they got it.
“You’re all scum. The filth that Earth shits every morning. Wargame doesn’t give a shit about your lives, and neither do I. But you’re all too dumb to realize it! You’re all dead!”
The message cut off and left the gangers to make their next move. The gangers picked whatever scraps of armor and weaponry they could and made their way to the airlock leading to the mess area, and from there, the doors to the surface and to the landing pad.
The gangers had now formed into a two hundred strong war party as they made they way to th
e big heavy doors. Using scraps of armor and numb-rods, they were able to wedge the door open. With the strength of the combined men they were able to pull the doors apart and funnel in the anxious gangers.
Tariot kept himself towards the rear of the pack as the war party made their way past him. The pack ran into the completely empty mess area. As they rounded the corner they all halted as they were met with a line of fifty guards forming two ranks, one standing and one kneeling.
They were armed with assault rifles and miniature hard light shields deployed in front of their firing line. The gangers who were too ignorant to realize their doom was to come or the ones that just didn’t care began thumping their feet in aggression. The guards were standing at the ready as their sergeant stood off to the side.
Ricketts stood in front of the war party, gritting his teeth as he looked at the dozens of barrels ready to cut them all down.
The sergeant opened his mouth to give the order. Crusoe was a man of his word.
“Open-!”
The sergeant slumped to the floor before he could finish his order. Another guard looked at him to see blood flowing from his head.
Suddenly, barely audible synchronized shots killed the entire first rank of guards. Some of the remaining guards looked to the patrol catwalks above and saw enough to frighten them.
“Above us!” A guard shouted. He raised his rifle and sent a full auto burst into thin air before a bullet smacked into his neck, dropping him. The rest of the guards began shooting wildly above. The muzzle flashes and thunder of automatic fire filled the mess hall.
Ricketts roared as he saw more and more guards begin falling. He pointed his arm at the remaining guards and charged with his war party. Some of the guards turned their attention back to them, firing into the swarm of gangers, some of them falling but it was too late as the gangers mowed them down.
The gangers jumped over the shields and piled on top of the remaining guards, beating them to death. Ricketts picked up a rifle as did many of the other. Some of the lesser gangers among them weren’t familiar with modern rifles but they could pull a trigger.
Tariot moved beside Ricketts and picked up a pistol off one of the guards.
“You ready, Doctor Slice?” Ricketts grinned.
“Let’s hurry, ENF has probably already been alerted.” The war party began to move out as Tariot looked above him to see nothing there. He felt a shiver go down his spine.
The final door was breached, letting snow spill into the building but it was soon opened fully. Tariot and Ricketts sprinted outside with the war party behind them.
There was a heavy snow blowing in from the left making visibility poor but still manageable for flying. As Tariot ran, he immediately stopped as he saw a man standing a hundred meters away, staring him down. He was dressed in a black suit with a black overcoat draped around his shoulders clasped with a gold chain. His expression was hard to gauge behind his black sunglasses. He began to move towards them.
Smoldering wrecks of Prison VTOLs were burning all around along with dead bodies soiling the snow with blood. The man in black simply walked past it all.
“You owe me a cure, Mister Tariot!” the man yelled. He leaned on a sheathed sword, ancient and alien by design, but he used it to aid his walking; an obvious limp in his step.
Tariot began to back up but bumped into Ricketts behind him. “Commander…” Tariot gasped.
“Curing the planet is not something one simply walks away from, wouldn’t you agree, Marcus?” The Commander said as he made his way to him.
Ricketts stepped forward to address the mysterious man, his gangers sensing he obviously wasn’t allied with Pluto.
“Who are you, shades?!” Ricketts yelled.
“War Chief Ricketts, I presume?”
“Who’s askin’, fancy man?”
“Wargame wants his top Chief back. And I’ve obliged to get you back to him. Provided you merry bunch join me and Wargame for the coming war.”
Ricketts smiled as he motioned for his war party to stand down. Tariot was glad he did so as snow began to fall on silhouettes all around them, the flakes beginning to reveal men wearing the optic camouflage.
“Who we warring with?” Ricketts smiled but it quickly faded as he saw an ENF dropship approaching from the horizon with a three-fighter escort. The war party began to inch backwards.
The Commander payed no attention as a group of all black fighters led by a gold fighter with black bands on the wings, all with a bird insignia on the tail fins, soared over them and launched missiles at the approaching ENF group. The ENF dropship exploded in a blue flame, and the fighters were overcome with multiple flanking aircraft.
The bird insignia on the black fighters appeased Ricketts sense of flash. The Commander stepped forward as an ENF fighter crashed and skidded in the snow only stopping a couple hundred feet from him.
“Everyone.”
The gold fighter soared past, ripping through the sound barrier, launching a missile at the control tower. The tower exploded sending the entire correctional facility into disarray.
Tariot saw no other choice but to join his former client. Ricketts nodded his head.
“What do I call you then?”
All the Commandos began deactivating their cloaking devices revealing, ten, then twenty, then a hundred of them, all encircling the savage gangers.
“You can call us the Golden Bough.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
R.L.M. (Robert Louis Martin) Sanchez introduces his debut novel in the science fiction genre with VIRION. Dreaming by night and dreaming harder by day, he writes to share fun and entertaining stories, as well as keep himself occupied by bringing what lives in dreams to life. He lives in the lone-star state of Texas, plotting his next adventure amongst the stars.
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