Forest Empire: Survival in a Dystopian World (BONES BOOK TWO 2)

by Jim Rudnick

  The Forest Empire had five floaters that still had to be taken up to the nearby oil exploration compound for fuel and helium top ups. The Empire used them sparingly; as a resource they knew was above all else the Empire had, they needed to be conserved. Three of the blimp technicians were now members of the Forest Empire, so they’d gained their own built-in maintenance crew too.

  He had heard about other assets that were warehoused at the oil exploration compound, but as yet that was only rumor. He would need to send up a team to confirm that discovery, perhaps with the next fuel trip.

  What was still more important was the pyramid project, and it was to be completed in a little over a year on the fall equinox day. That day was special to the Forest Empire society as it was on that day that god had chosen to wipe out the non-believers on Ceti4. Bombs had fallen, it was said, all across the planet, and billions had died—except here in the Forest Empire. Here, the architect knew, they found themselves suddenly alone—and on their knees praying to god to save them—and he did just that.

  It had taken almost a year for all of the Empire to concentrate themselves here in Empire City; even now, years later, sometimes new citizens came out of the forests to seek asylum and refuge. And they were accepted, of course, if they passed the Inquisition Board.

  He smiled at that as some, of course, did not pass—they were non-believers who decried even the existence of god and claimed that he had not called for extinction of non-believers but that it was aliens who’d done this to Ceti4.

  He shook his head. Such non-believers were immediately found wanting by the Inquisition Board and placed into slavery to help build the new pyramid.

  They needed more slaves—labor to help move more stones and get the pyramid completed on its due date, only fifteen months away. He watched as one of the handlers had to discipline a slave almost right in front of him, the slave getting a crack on his shoulder by the handler’s cane. The cane was hardwood, and when handled right, it left a serious set of bruises, and if it hit a bone with little flesh padding, it could break a slave’s arm. But the handlers knew, like they all knew, slaves were not to be disciplined so badly as to make them unusable—so most of the blows were to areas that were padded.

  We need more slaves, else the pyramid will not be finished, the master architect thought, as he once again checked the wide plans that lay on the builder’s desk in front of him. Under the gazebo tarp over his head, the sun shaded out, it was almost pleasant enough to just sit and watch and wish for more speed. But more speed meant more labor, and that was not his area.

  At the next project meeting, the architect thought, I’ll have to speak up about the Equinox Games and the dozens of slaves who are sacrificed then. God knows, he thought, that we love him without the shedding of blood—but that, he knew, was heresy here in the Forest Empire. Sacrifices had to be made at the Games, to prove our worth was the mantra. He shrugged.

  Just hope that in three months and a bit we have many more slaves to help with the pyramid too …

  #####

  The Sophon sat off the last of their search planets, and the crew was stumped.

  Not a single world within those twenty light years had yielded the missing human ship. They’d looked for nuclear power on all the search planets, and there was not a single bit of evidence found to indicate a human ship. The audit of these few planets was an extra for them, and they’d relayed their findings to the Boathi home world by Ansible. The audit showed that humans could come back from the bombing of a planet better than other races had. Perhaps, the captain thought, I should mention that to HQ and try to get the virus to be even more virulent.

  He scratched his left ear opening, the dewclaw on his right forearm digging into the hole, and the sound for him was doubly loud in his quarters. Sitting at the side table, looking out at the last planet they’d just left without finding a human ship, he wondered if there might be something else the Boathi did not know.

  How could a ship—a nuclear-powered ship—that should be easily located on a planet with no other nuclear devices up and running not be found? How indeed, he wondered.

  He smoothed out the sheaf of papers in front of him and then spread them out but found that too confusing. Instead, he spoke to the ship’s AI, and eventually on screen in front of him, the view changed from the planet below to a graphic representation of the immediate area of space.

  He enlarged the scale to show where they’d originally met the human ship. He narrowed the scope of the presumed twenty light years to show all the planets that the humans could have reached. There were only seven.

  Each one, he noted, as he zoomed in on them one by one, had been scanned from low orbits for nuclear power.

  Each one had come up blank—there was no nuclear power on any of them.

  New settlements, new power sources, and new civilization and society on a couple—but no nuclear power.

  Without nuclear power, no human ship could fly.

  Therefore, there were no human ships on those worlds.

  That kind of reasoning was infallible.

  Truth with certainty.

  He shook his head at that and the odd thought that maybe the human ship had crashed into the sea on one of the planets and gone all the way to the bottom, thousands of feet of water above it.

  But that too made him shrug. The scans the Boathi performed would find a nuclear reactor under mountains of rock or water. So the nuclear engines had to be found—unless maybe they were turned off.

  That thought made him sit up a bit straighter in his chair and re-think that idea.

  Why would someone, a human, mind you, so there was really no way of knowing, turn off their reactor? Yank the rods out of the fissionable material chambers and dampen down the whole reactor. Completely turn it off.

  But why? Only, of course, to prevent a chain reaction via shutting down the whole reactor and to save their lives.

  “Or,” he answered himself, “to simply turn off the reactor—to hide it.”

  This was an alien thought to him, he realized. Turning off a reactor meant no power at all, other than what might have been available from batteries, for a few months at best. If the Sophon turned off her reactor, she’d be falling onto the planet below in hours to crash horribly. If the ship landed first and then turned off the reactor ... that might be something that a human might have thought to do.

  But it’d been almost two months now since the human ship had fled. With traveling time and then reactor shutdown time, she was most likely out of battery life. Or soon would be.

  In the very unlikely event that the humans would power up their nuclear reactor once again, he had to come up with something to help him find out when that happened and on what planet.

  He spoke to AI again and then called in the Boathi chief engineer. Together they worked on a new addition to a simple satellite to be sent to all the planets they’d just searched.

  Each satellite would be delivered by a probe, anchored in low orbit, and then monitor for nuclear reactor presence on the planet itself once per day. If it found same, it would send back word on that to Boathi HQ—and to him and the Sophon too.

  If we’ve missed them because these humans are still hiding, like cowards, then we will find them once they think that they’re safe …

  Find them and then finally take care of them once and for all …

  #####

  Javor sat in the sidewalk café with Bruce, Wayne, and Jon and smiled. Their table for four was at the apex of the outside patio, and it was closer to the big square in the center of Arlington than any other table. While he had no idea why, many items that favored the visiting tourist were in the square itself. Were things so much better that now there were entrepreneurs who worked the visiting tourist type of sales?

  There were racks of large easels holding photos of Arlington—both before and after the bombs fell. There were photos of beaches, bridges, and even the Adair Dam too. Each of these photos was similar in size to what was onc
e known as a postcard, as well as having the back side separated into both an area to write a message as well as an address.

  All we need, he thought, not knowing if there really was one, is a mail system that a tourist could use.

  He smiled and noted there were several street entertainers too. Some played an instrument, and he recognized a guitar of some odd type with nine strings; the instrument was played by vibrating varying sizes of metal strips over a central cored gourd. There were keyboards and even an old bugler too. When all the buskers were playing their own tunes at once, it was a wave of music that he was glad was distant from their café table.

  One entertainer, a very old man, held Javor’s interest. The old man escaped some kind of manacles that the tourists attached to him.

  “Good trick to know,” Wayne said, and everyone around the table nodded.

  Javor sipped his beer slowly and savored the bitter hops that had been used.

  Jon said, “Is this pretty normal for the city? This kind of tourist-type visitors?”

  No one knew and the question remained unanswered.

  “Anyone as yet got an answer for the Circle? We going north?” Bruce asked, and the conversation began.

  “Far as we—the Shorecroft Patrol is concerned, my HQ left it up to me to decide—and we’re going. You guys?” he asked.

  Javor sat back to see what the cadre from Maxwell would say. Bruce and Wayne looked at each other and grinned.

  “We’re both in—Sue too. That’s seven of us so far …” Bruce said, and the three of them looked at Javor.

  He stared back. He said nothing for a moment as he sipped again from his beer. “I’m in too—learning about Bones is going to be easiest by actually seeing as much of her as I can see.”

  “Figuring,” Bruce said as he tilted his head to one side, “that when the Cavalry arrives, you’ll go back out into space, and the knowledge you’ve picked up here will help in the war. Do I have that right?” he ventured.

  Javor smiled and nodded. “My round—if these credits from the Circle will work,” he answered.

  Jon nodded. “Was up first thing this morning and went out to get some coffees, and yup, they work fine,” he said and grinned as he finished the last slurp of his beer.

  They sat for another couple of hours, drinking beer with no zombies coming at them or tribes of slavers searching for them.

  “Besides,” Javor said, “I owe that big palooka of a disciple a little payback,” and that got him a smile, and he toasted Arlington with the rest of the group.

  #####

  The meeting with the Circle had gone well, except for one small point, Javor thought, as he followed the sergeant down the third flight of stairs into the sub-basement of the big Regime Armories building.

  Vera had said calmly that she thought that Sue, acting for the Regime, would be able to get the job done diplomatically. Vera believed Sue was an excellent person to have at the lead of the group to get the Forest Empire to quit their ways of buying slaves and raiding the Regime’s outlying towns via their surrogates, the tribes.

  Diplomacy can work, but only if both sides have something to gain.

  The Regime would gain some respite from the Empire’s changes in their slavery needs. And the Empire would gain … what?

  He had no idea, but he hoped that Sue carried with her some kind of deal sweetener that she’d roll out when the time came to help the deal come together.

  Of course, there was the other way too—simply take out the Empire leaders and the population would follow a new course. One that ended the slavery issue.

  Slaves. He shook his head as they all piled up while the sergeant keyed in some kind of code into the door ahead, and they walked into the armory.

  He grinned. “Nice toys,” he said to himself and went over to the shotgun racks to work his way through re-arming himself.

  While he saw not a single manufacturer he recognized, he looked at the more than eight types of shotguns on display with backups stored in racks behind them.

  He pulled down a shotgun and looked it over. Single barrel, pump action, looked like she’d hold about four shells, plus one in the chamber. He pumped the action a few times, and Bruce, who was nearby, looked over and shook his head.

  “Nope, not for you. Move over three and that’s the one you’d be wanting,” he said and went back to look at the long sniper rifles in front of him.

  Javor moved over and pulled down the shotgun in the fourth rack over, and it was a gem for sure.

  Lightweight, yet balanced. Single barrel, pump action, but would hold at least eight shells plus one in the chamber. Manufacturer was someone called Taylor Arms, which meant nothing to him, but Bruce nodded as Javor hoisted it to his shoulder to sight down the barrel. Not a combat shotgun, but still a weapon I could count on.

  He grinned at the sergeant and said, “I’m done,” and tucked the gun under his arm.

  The sergeant grunted and said, “Ammo?” He opened a drawer against the other side of the rack holding the guns.

  Javor searched through and found what he was looking for—buckshot. He took more than five dozen of the 12-gauge double-aught shells with a narrow spread pattern. Great for alley cleaning, he thought, and he added a couple of dozen shells of birdshot in steel shot too. Good for dinner, too …

  He found some ammo for his Colt and helped himself to a few hundred rounds. “Done,” he said, and he watched as the seven others went through the armory and picked out their own weapons.

  Once outfitted, they all met back up with the Circle in the lobby of the Armories, and their sendoff was complete.

  Each carried their weapon and backpack. The Regime had also added new MREs for them too, and some of the flavors, he could tell, were going to be tough to swallow.

  All packed up, they got pats on the back from Vera and the rest of the Circle, and then they were on their way.

  Javor noted that each of them also got a full and complete set of maps. The detail was great and the scale not so much, but he, like he was sure everyone else had, folded the map to show the path north and west to the Forest Empire city, which was about three hundred miles away.

  At, say, fifteen miles a day, that’s like a twenty-day hike. Of course, it’s a dense forest and there’s gonna be rivers and maybe small mountains or canyons too … but still. A twenty-day walk is not too bad.

  He smiled at the Circle. He was sure this was going to be an easy mission.

  “Easy-peasy,” he said to himself as he hoisted his backpack and got her balanced on his hips and shoulders and walked away from the Armories, heading north and then west.

  Twenty days … what could happen in twenty days …

  CHAPTER THREE

  The path was not fresh nor well worn. Sue said, “It probably isn’t much more than a path that deer take occasionally.” Nevertheless, she led the way on point as the team moved always north.

  The path curled occasionally around a dip or swale in the way. Once it doubled back on itself, and Sue left the path only to find it again just a few hundred yards ahead of them. Sometimes they passed by animals, and one time they scared a deer out of an area just off to the left. Hares jumped out of their way, and what Javor thought looked like grouse ruffled their feathers, and as they continued to advance, the birds took off and their wing beats could be heard for quite a while.

  The forest that the path went through was about as dense as could be while still allowing the team to work their way through. Fir trees were in stands with deciduous trees interspersed around them. Often the path went between two firs and they all had to walk carefully as the branches would strip off items on their vests or belts or even crush down on their backpacks too.

  Sometimes, the forest was so thick that the black spruce stands fell right down to the banks of the tiny creeks. When they came upon a small creek, they’d walk the creek bed itself—having wet feet was not as bad as not finding a way northward..

  Jack pine, poplar, birch, larch, and h
emlocks surrounded them, and all of them soared up to the canopy that was at least fifty feet above them. Needles covered the grounds in clumps in places and thinly spread in others. The brownish ground cover was also a problem as sometimes walking on it meant their feet got snagged in the calf-long strands, and both Jon and Wayne had taken a tumble due to their missteps.

  Today, day two of the long hike to the Forest Empire, was a dull day. Whenever they could even see the sky through the heavy coniferous cover above, it was mostly cloudy gray skies. Javor had warmed up pretty early yesterday and had taken off his light camouflage jacket and tied it around his waist at lunchtime. Today, he started with the jacket already off. Being somewhat in shape and an ex-athlete helped quite a bit. But the reminder he was more than fifty years of age, and therefore not quite up to the level of fitness of most around him, was driven home whenever someone jumped over an obstacle and he had to go around same.

  The path had petered out again, and Sue was now standing still, map and compass in hand, and she called a halt. “Looks like we’re doing fine so far,” she said as she pointed off over her left shoulder. “North is that way, and we’ll stay on pace for the next couple of hours ‘til lunch—everyone okay with that?” she asked, looking at Wayne.

  He nodded and said, “Got three layers of them bandages on my big heel blister … it’s still bugging me, but yeah, I’ll clean and wash it up at lunchtime.”

  “Do not sit near me,” Bruce said, “’cause today is MRE Sloppy Joes day.” He grinned and that got a laugh at least from most of them.

  Randi, one of the Shorecroft Patrollers, grinned and said, “Ooh … nice, blister puss for a topping,” and everyone laughed heartily.

  Sue traded off the point job with Javor who nodded and then took the compass from her and moved up to lead the team north. He pushed his way through the branches of a massive white spruce ahead and continued to push ahead north. Almost an hour later, he found a small creek wit the current coming toward them. He picked his way along the left bank, careful to watch where he stepped, and after about thirty feet, he saw something shiny in the creek near the bank.