…
Stan was on his third or fourth house by now and was rushing through a burning slum-house with a little girl draped over his shoulders when a cascade of rubble buried the front door. He growled, "That is not good. Here, you will have to walk, where is the nearest wall that connects to an alley or another house?" The little girl pointed to the kitchen area, flames already licking the ceiling. "Okay, that does not look optimal..."
Stan coughed because of the smoke. The fire was in the room above them but was quickly using up the remaining oxygen. "How about that wall there, where does it lead?" Stan pointed to a wall with his axe, and the little girl affirmed that it lead outside.
"Good. Cover your ears little one, and your face, and do not get crushed." The little girl nodded, and Stan took the sledge and began breaking the wall down, hoping to God that it wasn't load-bearing. He opened a hole big enough for himself and ran to get the little girl, helping her to get out and telling her to run just before a massive wall of fire exploded behind him, sending him into the opposite wall and breaking his nose against it. It didn't catch him on fire but definitely knocked him unconscious next to a house that was bound to collapse. The little girl ran to get help.
…
Meanwhile, Jack had designed a very basic flyer using a pencil and the nearest piece of paper he could find. It consisted of an arm holding up a sword, with the words "Freedom or Death" superimposed. He figured they could make the flyers, then write a short manifesto of sorts on the back. He started writing, sure to include the abuses against the human rights they shared with the nations of the earth, their mother nations, and why the continued allowance of this abuse was an injustice beyond measure. He was sure to include various malignant business practices of Aerotec and the other industries. He became so engrossed in his work that he didn't notice when Valerie arrived back at Stan's apartment.
"Watcha workin' on Tiger? Is that what you plan for us to print a billion copies of and distribute late at night?" Valerie said as she lugged the heavy metal box over to Jack, "I like it. Very retro-modern. Very fitting for some Cyrillic or Latin blocks. Any word from Stan?"
Jack bolted up, first confused then reassured, "No actually, the fire is still burning for the most part and-" there was a knock at the door, "Maybe that's him?" Jack stashed away his work from the past few hours while Valerie walked over to the door, looking through the peephole.
"Oh shit..., it's him and a... friend. But he doesn’t look good at all." Valerie opened the door, and Stan stumbled into the room, covered in black soot, blood dripping down his face from a cut in his head and his broken nose, most of it dried. Helping to hold him up was a little dark-haired girl, maybe 10 or 12 years old. Stan mumbled something about water before collapsing into a chair.
Chapter 7
After the initial shock of seeing Stan in the condition he was in, they realized it was a lot worse than it looked. Mild dehydration, a broken nose, and a cut in his forehead, all of which were fixed within an hour. The little girl never left his side for the entire time, somewhat to the consternation of Val, who repeatedly asked her to step aside only to realize that the girl didn't speak English.
"Stan, could you tell this girl to move away, it's kind of hard to reset your nose with her practically sitting in your lap. Who even is she anyway?" Val said, slightly annoyed.
Stan sighed and spoke some Russian to the girl, who went and sat next to Jack. "She is an orphan I saved from a slum fire. She saved me after I got knocked out by a backdraft or something. She went and grabbed one of her neighbors, and they dragged me away from the house a few minutes before it collapsed. If it was not for her, I'd have been burnt to a toast after being crushed by at least a ton of rubble. Her name is Maria, and she is mine now."
Stan faced Maria and spoke to her. She mumbled out a decent 'hello' in English, before hiding her head in the couch cushions. "See, she is not a bad kid! Her parents died a few years ago apparently, but none of her neighbors could afford to support her, and she has no surviving family. So I have adopted her. Not officially of course, but considering the little revolution we have planned, it won't matter."
Jack spoke now, a bit incredulously, "So you're telling me you saved this one little girl and, finding that she had no parents, decided to adopt her as your own? Stan, you have the largest heart I've ever seen. Besides, she can be useful for the revolution as well, but you have a much larger problem more immediately at hand."
Stan chuckled and asked, "And what might that be?"
Valerie stepped back in front of Stan, and placed her hands on his broken nose, causing him to realize what the problem was. "Oh.... that. I am ready Val."
Val shrugged and pushed his nose back into place, oddly enough only causing Stan to wince with pain and clench of his teeth, and soon Val was putting a simple aluminum cast on his nose. "Stan, I'll never understand your pain tolerance. But while you were gone, Jack made us a little propaganda flyer, as well as a sort of manifesto. It looks alright if we can print it."
Stan considered this, and responded, "As I said, I have a printer, is no problem. It is a rather old printer, but it will do fine, just make sure the image is highly contrasted to the background and we'll be fine. I'll go get it and we can get started." Stan stood up and wobbled his way to a back room.
"So Val, looks like we're really doing this huh?" Jack said, his thoughts once again racing at a million miles an hour, "We sure have come a long way from being teenage street rats haven't we?"
Val considered this for a moment, then spoke, "Jack... We still are street rats or rather mine rats. I do have a question for you though."
"And what might that be?" Jack said.
"Where in the hell did you get a gun that's over two hundred years old and still works?" Valerie inquired, almost suspiciously.
Jack laughed at this and took the old revolver out of the box, looking like it was brand new. "Val, this piece here has been in my family for generations. We never had any ammo for it after certain laws were put in place, but we held on to it nonetheless. But... Well after my parents died I've modified the hell out of it, so it actually functions now, and I've made it so that I can put several modifications and attachments on it, like a longer barrel, a scope, whatever. It still only holds nine rounds, but it should work well enough."
"I really don't like the emphasis on that 'should'. Have you ever fired it?" Val said with no small amount of concern.
"Nope. Don't have any ammunition, but I could probably make some with a 3D printer and some gunpowder, or even black powder. Unless we want to try to make it into a laser gun, it's pretty much useless for now, except for show."
Just then, Stan made his way back into the room carrying a large printer that was at least several decades old, and probably barely in working condition. "Here she is! An old 2015-ish printer. Do not ask how I got it, because I do not remember. She has- Jack, since when did you have a gun?"
Jack threw on an over-the-top 1930s mobster accent, "Eh, don't worry 'bout it bubsy, it's none-a ya business y'hear?" he dropped the impression, "It's a family heirloom, don't worry about it. I don't have any gunpowder or lead to make ammo anyway. Now, are you sure that this printer is going to work? It's gotta be like fifty years old."
Stan theatrically gasped in mock offense "What? No, she is only 35! Perfectly fine!"
"How did 'she' even get to Mars?" Val interjected, poking a little fun at Stan.
"I don't ask you how you got to Mars! How rude! But seriously, she will do. I have made sure that she works from time to time, and she will work perfectly for our task." Stan plugged the old Epson up and opened the photocopier tray.
"Put your image there, it will scan it, and we can print the image, then take the paper we need images on and set the printer to type the manifesto on them! See, this will work! Just follow the instructions on the screen and you will be fine. I am going to take care of Maria now, while you two get to work."
Stan walked off without further explanation,
but luckily the printer's interface was intuitive enough that Jack and Valerie were able to figure it out well enough, and soon they had a small stack of flyers.
...
A few hours later...
"Val, Stan, I just realized something," Jack had a potentially disastrous epiphany, "How are we going to organize this rebellion? Just tell people to meet in the streets? Call us? We can't exactly openly lead a rebellion.”
Stan looked surprised at first, then spoke "Er... I suppose we could do it like spies, you know... codenames and burner phones, secret assassinations in the night... Proxies and whatnot... It could work."
Jack stared blankly at Stan, confused. "Stan, none of us know anything about spying and subversion."
"Well... that is not entirely true," Stan confessed, sort of.
Valerie sat up straighter, astonished and equally confused, "Are you telling us that you were a spy?"
"No, not a spy! Remember how I said I was in the military? I was a clandestine operations officer! Or I was until a whole bunch of peace and trade agreements went through, abolishing my profession. But then I settled here and met you two, and life has been decent ever since." Stan continued on cheerfully as if he hadn't just dropped a massive bombshell of a revelation. "What? You guys look at me like I am ghost!"
Jack and Val continued in stunned silence for a few more moments, then Jack finally spoke, "Stan, I will never understand you. But, at least you can help even more now, and since you know what you're talking about and we have no other course of action, I say we can go the clandestine route with organizing this rebellion. I guess that means you get to give us a rundown on how we should do it then?"
"Da, exactly Jack! I can teach you and Val basics from what I remember! But that does mean that our propaganda project will have to hold off unless you just want to raise tensions without giving people a rallying point."
Jack and Valerie exchanged a look between themselves, then nodded, and Val spoke, "Yeah, we shouldn't rush into this revolution business, and besides, preparing for about a month will give us better results anyway, won't it?"
Stan laughed heartily and responded, "Exactly, there have been wars fought with less preparation, so we will be fairly well off. We will take a month to train since that is a believable amount of time for Jack's recovery, then you two can quit your jobs when you return to work, but give pamphlets out to your coworkers first."
"Sounds like a plan." Jack and Val replied simultaneously, and they got to work.
Chapter 8
One month later…
Jack lay prone on the top of the aluminum-framed building, his body covered in raggedy blankets and other assorted junk while he looked out over the crowd. A month of training in sabotage, surveillance, and how to stay alive while being covert, as well as planning to accomplish the first salvos of the rebellion had all come to this. The group had received word that their former supervisor, Dale, was to be punished by a severe flogging today, and Jack was determined to put an end to Culloch's tyranny while Valerie and Stan were out nailing flyers to doors.
Jack was going to put a bullet through Culloch's chest before he laid a hand on Dale, and he would fire an arrow from a small homemade crossbow into the sand from afar with a simple flyer on it. The fist with a sword, with three simple words emblazoned across the top: Stop Aerotec's Tyranny.
The only reason Jack was able to do this was that Culloch had relocated the "Courtroom" outside for better publicity of punishments, and probably to pat his massive ego. Jack pulled out his revolver, having configured it to be as accurate as possible -essentially making it into a hunting rifle- and readied himself as the first bells rang out, signaling everyone to report to the courtyard.
Meanwhile, Val and Stan were wandering through the American and Russian provinces nailing flyers to doors while everyone was at work, their appearances heavily obscured with clothes to hide their identities from any cameras, and ducking into alleys and climbing onto roofs when they needed to return to the house. Currently, Valerie and Stan had collectively spread over a thousand flyers throughout the city already, targeting low and lower-middle-class homes within the slums. The streets were mostly empty since everyone was at work, and the work was quick and easy, as long as they avoided the cameras. They would deal with those too, eventually.
…
The final bell rang, and Dale was escorted into the courtyard and tied down to the flogging post. He had done nothing wrong, except to speak out against the brutality of Aerotec's higher managers like Culloch.
Culloch stepped out with the flog in his hand, and Jack tracked the sights along with him, already having the sights' range set to the appropriate range of about 60 meters. Jack was dangerously close, but he'd be gone as soon as the arrow hit the ground. There you are you bastard... Bet you never expected to die by my hand... Not that you'll ever know.
...
Culloch raised the flog to strike, and Jack pulled the trigger. The massive revolver thundered in his hands and sent the massive bullet flying downrange. Jack grabbed the crossbow and fired the note before he slid back and down into the abandoned house and made his escape.
Erin Culloch had raised the flog, only to get shoved back by some invisible force. It felt like he had been punched by a heavyweight. He tried to raise his arm up to strike Perkins, but it wouldn't move, and the next thing he knew he was on the ground staring at the yellowish sky. He could feel it now...
He was dead before he could finish the thought, his blood already staining the rusty sands a darker shade of red, almost black. A small arrow impaled the ground near Dale, and when he was released he managed to grab it without anyone seeing him take it, not that anyone except Dale had noticed the arrow in the pandemonium following the shot.
...
Jack ran through the abandoned living room and into an alleyway. The gun and its parts had been stashed in his backpack beside the crossbow. It was a clean hi, and, hopefully, the flyer wouldn't get intercepted by Aerotec immediately. By now, Valerie and Stan would be back at the house, and Jack would be there in a couple hours. Everything was going to plan, and he hoped it would stay that way for now.
…
Dale had stuffed the note into his pants and was escorted into a room before being told that he was dismissed for the rest of the week, due to the overseer of the mine being dead and all, but all of his pay would be docked until further notice as punishment. Dale was perfectly fine with that. He made his way to his house, where his wife and kids were waiting anxiously. Sarah had heard the news about her husband's flogging but hadn't heard about the shooting yet.
"Dale! You're... Okay? I thought you were getting flogged today? Did Overseer Culloch finally get a heart or something?"
Dale laughed at that. "It's more like he lost whatever heart he had left. Someone shot him before he could strike a single blow on my poor back."
"Someone shot him? Who could have... That's impossible!" Sarah said, stunned. Hopefully, this wouldn't blow back onto Dale somehow.
"Well honey, I saw him bleed out on the ground with my own two eyes, but what intrigues me most is this-" he pulled out the flyer, which he hadn't looked at yet, "Right after Culloch falls down with his heart in a billion pieces, this little note flies down on an arrow from heaven, right in front of me."
Dale opened the flyer and did a double-take. "Someone is mighty brave to say something like that."
"What's it say, honey?"
"It says, and I quote: 'Stop Aerotec's Tyranny',” Dale read it off calmly.
Sarah was a little more shocked, not that it was surprising. "Someone thinks they can single-handedly take down the largest company on Mars? That's a doomed cause if ever I saw one. He'll probably be dead by tomorrow anyway."
Dale, however, was less convinced.
At the same time, hundreds of workers were returning home after being dismissed from work because of the assassination. They arrived to see identical flyers pinned to their doors, which they of course took. Each fl
yer had the fist and sword, emblazoned with the words "Stop Aerotec's Tyranny" across it like a banner, and printed on the back was a manifesto of sorts, decrying the abuses of Aerotec, and urging anyone with a complaint against the companies -anyone who cared about freedom- to rise up against these companies, to refuse to work until they addressed their needs, and to do the right thing and fight back against them by any means as long as they did not harm innocents, and they were encouraged to spread the word. There was also a phone number on the bottom.
…
"Stan, we went over this, they can triangulate phones, we can't have them tracing us!" Jack exclaimed, surprised that Stan might make such a foolhardy move. He had just looked at one of the flyers and noticed the change.
"No Jack, it's fine. I removed the cellular transponder, and besides, we can always stick it in a faraday cage, go to a park or something, and read the messages there. Everything is going to be fine! You two can return to work if you want in order to quit and, hopefully, our rebellion will go nicely. There is power in the word comrade, power in the word."
Jack huffed, his worries once again put out of mind.
Chapter 9
New Columbia went on with life in stunned silence for a week or so after the revelation that there was a group actively trying to rebel against Aerotec. Jack and Val quit their jobs, citing workplace safety and lack of security. Then the first messages came in. Stan had been washing dishes when the phone buzzed in his pocket, and he picked it up immediately after drying his hands and opened the messages.
Jack Cabe Page 3
