Rebels in Arms

by Ben Weaver

  And what we found inside should not have surprised us.

  The colonel and Ms. Brooks were seated in two jumpseats, their palms raised. Lieutenant Kayleb Addison gripped a handrail and aimed a particle pistol at them.

  “See, we’re fucking stupid,” Halitov told me. “You should’ve knifed this son of a bitch when you had the chance.”

  Paul and Jing shifted inside, and the doors slid automatically shut. We all stood there as the train’s driver drone spoke in a friendly, even voice, warning us to belt in and stand by for departure. The train jolted forward.

  “When we get to Orokean, we’ll all be going to the transit police,” said Addison.

  “Where’d he get the pistol?” Paul asked.

  “It’s mine, I’m afraid,” said Ms. Brooks. “I never did learn how to set the user specificity code, so he’s quite capable of blowing our heads off.”

  “That’s right,” Addison said with a nod. “Quite capable.”

  Jing sighed tiredly, vanished, reappeared behind Addison, and ripped the gun from his grip.

  Without warning, Halitov rushed forward, yanked the pistol away from Jing, then jammed it into Addison’s head. He widened his eyes at me. “This is what we do!”

  “No,” shouted the colonel, a word echoed by Paul.

  The pistol went off, and most of Addison’s head sprayed across the car’s windows before he slumped.

  “We’re fucking soldiers,” said Halitov, tossing the pistol hard at me. I tried to catch it, failed.

  “You idiot,” shouted Ms. Brooks. “We could’ve used him to testify before congress.”

  “Sorry,” Halitov said, grinding out the word. “Next time I’ll do a less efficient job of saving your ass.”

  “I’ll take credit for that,” said Jing, leering at Halitov.

  “All right, Captain,” the colonel began, rising to bring himself to full height and stare down at Halitov. “You killed him, you clean him up. Now.”

  Halitov sighed in disgust, then went over and seized Addison’s body by the shirt collar and dragged him toward the back of the car, leaving a blood trail in his wake.

  I shrank into a jumpseat. After a long moment, I finally asked Ms. Brooks if Satcomm, our main comm relay station, was still being jammed.

  She nodded. “We’ve already missed our first check-in with Vanguard. I’m sure they’ve tried to contact us and discovered the jamming. Major Kuhns will probably launch a counterattack. Once our fighters are under the jamming blanket, they can track and contact us. All we have to do is get out of this fire zone, get to Orokean, and stay alive.”

  The train’s brakes jammed on, throwing Halitov halfway across the car and sending my own jumpseat belts digging into my shoulders. Turbines cycled down.

  “They’ve patched into the driver drone,” said Ms. Brooks, frantically scanning her tablet’s screen. “Maybe I can override.”

  “Scott? Rooslin? Outside with me and Jing,” said Breckinridge, keying open a pair of doors. “Paul, you’re insurance.”

  He winked. As usual, Breckinridge continued commanding us, and I found it interesting how none of us questioned her authority. I still had mixed feelings about her, but since she had shared her feelings about her brother, I had begun to realize that she and I weren’t that different. I even admired how naturally she took lead, and I knew I could learn from her—if I continued being a soldier.

  She and Jing hopped onto a narrow catwalk that paralleled the maglev track. Per her instructions, Halitov and I mounted an exterior ladder leading to the car’s top. Once up there, we stared down the gloomy tunnel as the strings of glowing lights began winking out.

  “Stop the train, cut the power, take the prisoners,” sang Halitov.

  “You didn’t have to kill him,” I said, eyeing the blood splattered on his uniform.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t like his attitude.”

  “So he deserves to die for that?”

  “He was an enemy soldier. That’s reason enough. The attitude just made it easier.”

  “None of this bothers you? Switching sides, killing people we could’ve served with…”

  “Hey, asshole. My own sister’s fighting for the other side, and I haven’t seen her since the war broke out. Yeah, it bothers me, but you know what? You think too much. You keep wanting this to be some noble profession, and maybe it is when we’re not fighting. But when it comes to war, we’re supposed to be machines. We eat, fuck, and kill. That’s why we’re still alive.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “How ’bout you guys shut up and pay attention,” said Breckinridge. “’Cause here they come.” She and Jing mounted the ladder and joined us up top.

  We skinned up as four narrow lights, like the eyes of some dark-skinned monstrosity, appeared from the gloom, accompanied by a familiar and characteristic whir. My tactical computer fed me a magnified, infrared view of four airjeeps, each manned by the usual pilot and gunner, with two more heavily armed privates sitting in the backseats. There had to be more of them at the end of tunnel, I assumed. They knew we were conditioned. They wouldn’t send a small air cavalry.

  “Well this is nice,” said Jing. “Four of us…and four jeeps. Scott, which one you want?”

  Before I could answer, the train lurched forward, knocking all of us off our feet. I slid on my back across the train top, and, hearing Jing call my name, plummeted off the edge as the train sped away. I reached into the bond, and, with a shiver, felt only a cold numbness as I crashed back-first onto the track. My skin eased the blow, but a coruscating sea of light flashed across my eyes as I sat up and heard the train’s hum grow fainter.

  The airjeep gunners opened fire as I scrambled to my feet and charged after the train, running at a pace far too slow to reach it. I needed the damned bond, and I screamed for the mnemosyne in my head to do something. The train vanished and the report of cannon fire grew more muffled until there was nothing but my own breathing and a very distant booming pressing against the darkness.

  Run, I told myself. Just run. It’ll come. Just keep reaching for it.

  “Scott, you there?” Halitov called on our channel.

  “On my way,” I managed.

  “Where the hell are you? Little help, you know!”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  “Aw, shit!” he shouted, then, a second before he cut the channel, I heard the rat-a-tat of an airjeep’s cannon, a sound way too close for comfort.

  “Scott?” called Jing. “We need you.”

  “I’m coming,” I said, reaching yet again for the bond, my mental hands grasping air.

  “Better move your ass, St. Andrew!” yelled Breckinridge.

  My eyes burned with tears. I couldn’t help them unless the bond helped me. I was letting them down, letting myself down, and being painfully reminded that I needed to be reconditioned.

  With my lungs ragged and a fire raging in my legs, I slowed into a jog, into a fast walk, a walk, and then…I just stopped in the darkness, while my friends were taking on four airjeeps with probably more en route.

  I like to tell people that I’m not a quitter, that even in the worst situations, I always find something I can cling to, something that allows me to see the plausible within the impossible. And for most of my life, that’s been the case, but standing there, back on that track, with no bond and just the gloom, I realize now that I surrendered to the universe. A welcome peace came over me, a sense of utter relief in the knowledge that the war raging within and around me would no longer be fought. I had nothing to prove to anyone. I knew I was honorable, loyal, and had done my duty to the best of my ability, despite all of the deception and corruption. I knew that! I wasn’t a killer. I was a soldier.

  So I remained there, feeling a tremendous weight lift off my shoulders, feeling the bond slide in and envelop me with an intimacy I hadn’t felt before. And as my thoughts traveled back to my friends, so did I—

  The wind whipped over me, trying to peel back my utilities a
s I found myself once more atop the train. Linear turbines hummed along as a discharge of cannon fire from behind sent me craning my neck.

  There they were, all four airjeeps. Halitov hung over the side of one and was about to propel himself up, inside. Breckinridge wrestled with the gunner of another. Jing had killed her jeep’s four occupants and was trying to gain access to the pilot’s controls as her jeep arrowed forward on autopilot. The fourth airjeep had circled back and was laying down an unrelenting bead near the back of the train, where the linear turbine housing lay. Even as I ran across the train top, we emerged from the tunnel, and there we were, smack in the middle of Orokean’s downtown district, a vast metropolis built within an even vaster forest of gigantic trees, some of which had been bored out and turned into skyscrapers. Rope bridges festooned the branches between smaller residences, and condominiums had been constructed on some of the more colossal limbs, creating cul-de-sacs hanging five, even six hundred meters above the moss-covered earth.

  I had just a handful of seconds to appreciate the city before the fourth airjeep’s continued firing drew me fast and hard. I sprang off the train, found my bullet thrust, and took out the pilot with a single blow. Before the grunts in the backseat could withdraw their pistols, I grabbed the first by the throat, threw him overboard. Then I twisted the second one’s head, felt the snap, and dumped him over the side.

  The gunner did manage to lift his automatic pistol and fire a continuous bead point-blank into my face. I seized his wrist, pulled him out of the chair, then spun him by that wrist as though I were turning a key in an antique lock. I released him and let his own inertia carry him overboard.

  A powerful droning from above descended, and amid the fettered canopy of huge trees, another four airjeeps zeroed in on us. I leapt from my jeep and back onto the train, the jeep following mindlessly along.

  Jing vanished from her ride, and I knew she’d reappear aboard another. I can do that, I told myself. And I can deal with the drain. I can.

  As Halitov and Breckinridge continued battling with the Marines in their airjeeps, I willed myself from the train to one of the new ships. And there I was, gripping the seats behind the two Marines in the back. I tapped one’s shoulder. He turned, gaped at me, tried to swing around his pistol. I pulled him out of the seat, dumped him overboard, felt his partner’s rifle jab my skin, felt the rebound, then grabbed the back of his jumpsuit and dragged him out. Their cries faded as they dropped a hundred or so meters, only to rebound into bags of broken bones.

  I hopped into the backseat, grabbed both the pilot and gunner by the back of the neck. As I pulled them out of their seats, the airjeep yawed sharply. The damned pilot had failed to set the autocorrect in the event his hands left the controls. The pilot and gunner flew out of the jeep, with me right behind them, about to plunge the full hundred meters to the surface. I slapped a palm on one of the jeep’s stubby wings, clutched it with everything I had, until I managed to look ahead and see the oncoming rope bridge, a narrow, low-tech affair constructed between two housing projects nestled on wide limbs.

  Three, two, one, I let go.

  And the airjeep collided with the bridge, even as I reached for one of the rope railings, seized it, watched the jeep forge on, the ropes growing tangled around it.

  Two middle-aged women who’d been carrying stacks of laundry across the bridge had already dropped their loads and were racing toward the west end—

  When the pitons that held the ropes there pulled free from the wood, and the bridge suddenly dropped and swung through the air, driven wildly by the airjeep still tangled within it. The two women screamed and were tossed about. One of them lost her grip, shrieked, and fell away.

  Shuddering off a wave of dizziness, I willed myself beside her, appearing suddenly to clutch her before she hit the ground. I slowed our descent until we struck the moss. Our landing was anything but gentle, though I doubted she had even sprained her ankles. She looked at me, then her eyelids fluttered, and she fainted.

  The second woman continued wailing, and the bridge whipped around the tree like a fishing line with the airjeep caught on the hook. I thought of leaping into the air, but I wasn’t sure I could span the entire hundred meters, so, as a crowd began gathering below, I ran to the tree and right up it, weaving my way past windows carved into its bark. Once I neared the still-swinging bridge, I threw myself into the air, reached the rope, then, fighting against the roaring airjeep, I reached the woman.

  “Take my hand!” I screamed.

  She winced, took one hand off the rope, clutched mine.

  “Okay, now the other hand.”

  She shook her head fiercely.

  “You have to trust me.”

  The bridge jerked hard to the left, and I exploited the jerk to yank her other hand free. People below screamed and gasped as we fell from the bridge. I knew that if I survived the drop, Halitov would give me hell for “wasting time on saving civilians,” but I felt responsible for these women, and the look on the second woman’s face as we slowed, then struck the ground made it all worthwhile. She burst into tears and hugged me harder than I have ever been hugged before.

  “Rizma!” a man cried, pushing himself through the crowd. I assumed he was the woman’s husband. He took her into his arms, then eyed me intently. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  I could only imagine the reactions of the crowd when the soldier who had just rescued two women simply winked out of their lives.

  And a billionth of a second later, I collapsed on top of the train, which forged on through the city, now following a serpentine path between great tree trunks and suddenly gliding through a tunnel burrowed straight through one. When we emerged on the other side, I sat up and searched the skies for the other airjeeps. Nothing. I crawled across the top, toward the ladder, mounted it, then keyed open the doors, where the colonel, Ms. Brooks, and Paul still waited.

  “Where are they?” the colonel cried over the engine’s din and rush of air.

  “I don’t know,” I said, swinging myself inside.

  “We’re almost at Blue Forest Station,” said Ms. Brooks. “We get off there.”

  An airjeep whipped by the open doors, and I turned back, remounted the ladder, and spotted Jing in the pilot’s seat. She wheeled around, then brought the airjeep into a hover, near the open doors. I climbed aboard, asking, “Where’s everyone else?”

  “I don’t know. But look…” Her gaze went skyward, where squadron after squadron of Alliance atmoattack jets streaked down toward the city, their wings sagging under the weight of missiles.

  “They can’t be from Rebel ten-seven,” I said. “They wouldn’t bomb the city.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. My guess is the alliances have been monitoring the Seventeen’s attack on us. They saw an opportunity and took it.”

  “I knew this would happen,” I said. “I just knew it.”

  She lowered her head. “The battle for Aire-Wu has just begun.”

  16

  Halitov and Breckinridge approached in an airjeep, zooming in above me and Jing. Halitov had his hand wrapped around the throat of a nervous-looking pilot.

  “The city’s under attack,” Breckinridge said evenly. “I thought I spotted some of our fighters up there. Screen shows all planetary defenses coming on-line.”

  “And the screen better show our asses tawting out of here,” said Halitov.

  “Brooks says we’re getting off at Blue Forest Station,” I said, then pointed ahead toward a cluster of gargantuan trees between which hung a metallic web of architecture that was the busy station’s east side.

  We came within a half kilometer of the station when the maglev tracks ahead exploded under missile fire. I hadn’t even heard the atmoattack jet’s approach, but there it was, its shadow wiping over us as the train barreled toward the twisted and smoking wreckage ahead.

  “We have to get them out,” Breckinridge said.

  “I say we get Paul and leave the other two,” corrected Halitov with a w
ink.

  Jing rolled her eyes and took our airjeep in close to the doors. I jumped out, clutched the ladder, worked the keypad. The doors slid apart, and Jing brought the airjeep in recklessly close, its left side banging hard against the train. Paul helped Ms. Brooks into the jeep, then spotted for the colonel, who made an impressive leap into the backseat.

  “I’ll get out with them,” Paul hollered, lifting his chin to Halitov and Breckinridge.

  With a nod, I jumped back into the gunner’s seat, and Jing thrust up, jetting us away. As we circled back, I watched with horror as the pilot Halitov had been throttling suddenly bailed out and fell a dozen meters to the ground. As he tumbled away, the airjeep pitched hard, throwing Breckinridge across its hood as the craft jetted toward the ground at a forty-five-degree angle. Breckinridge clutched a seam in the jeep’s hood, and Halitov reached for her, his hand almost there, almost…

  “Bail!” she yelled, then let go.

  As she dropped, Halitov gaped at the oncoming ground, then jumped straight up, exiting the craft a heartbeat before it slammed into the ground, blasting up hunks of moss and showers of dirt that fell a second before a terrific fireball engulfed the entire zone, including Halitov.

  “Oh my God,” Jing muttered, then jerked the airjeep’s stick, taking us toward the scene. A terrific explosion just ahead stole my gaze: the maglev train derailed, flipped onto its side, then piled up on itself as smaller explosions resounded and metal crunched on metal. And from that chaos materialized Paul, skin glowing as he raced for his life.

  Below us now, Breckinridge swung around toward the fireball, set her skin to maximum, then sprinted into the flames. We zoomed in to hover a meter off the ground, the flames just off to my left and warming my cheeks.

  Halitov came running out of the dying fireball, spotted us, then whirled. “Where is she?” he cried.

  “In there! Looking for you!” I shouted back.

  As he turned, about to run back toward the shattered airjeep, a powerful whir of displaced air grew louder and turned my blood to ice. Incoming missile.