Jack Cabe

by Timothy Nguyen

  “Don’t you want to know what we found out?” Val said, now a bit concerned for Jack's mental health.

  ‘Oh, right. Alright, let’s get to work then. You two escape the madness of TC for now," Jack sighed, "Whatta we got?"

  Val planted her hands on the desk before speaking with regal authority, “Alright Jack, so Mana was getting drugs through official Aerotec shipping pipelines, which means the next rung on the most corrupt ladder is a thirty-something-year-old by the name of Edgar Phaxi. After him, everything in the drug trade is off-world, probably on other planets too. But obviously, killing Phaxi won’t solve our problems since it’ll create a power vacuum. So we have to finish our business here on Mars before we continue murdering the Aerotec Cartel. This means we should go in the opposite direction and attack the Prison first.”

  Jack understood, mostly, “But why the sudden change in tactic? We’ve been hitting their distributors this entire time, and until we have a foothold in the Inner City, we won’t be able to do anything to higher management.”

  Stan spoke now, his tone very optimistic, “Don’t you see Jack? They’ll think that we’ve been targeting their drug trade this entire time since we haven’t dealt with the whole of Aerotec for a few weeks. If we do this drastic change, Phaxi just might think that he isn’t our next target. But we can’t move on the prison until we have more people.”

  Jack chuckled, “Of course! How do we expect to raid a hyper-secure prison with a grand total of nine modestly trained soldiers? We need armored vehicles and we need personnel. Luckily, TC has already made a breakthrough with the Inquisitors, and thinks he can use their parts to make stuff for us.”

  Stan raised an eyebrow, “What kind of stuff Jack?”

  "Yeah Jack, what could the Inquisitors have that we can use?” Val parroted Stan, albeit unintentionally.

  “Come with me, and you’ll see,” Jack hopped up and opened the door before gesturing his friends forward. Jack led them to the makeshift lab TC had set up, which was surrounded by curtains like a hospital room. In the center of this curtained cube, TC stood over a myriad collection of pieces around what was once the skeleton of the Inquisitor. He looked like a surgeon, or perhaps a mortician.

  “Ah, Jack! Jolly good, I just figured out a way we could adapt the interface to living people without invasive-" The madman stopped mid-sentence when he took notice of Stan and Val, and he paused as if an internal computer was logging their faces into an ancient database, "Who are these two?”

  Stan and Val were shocked by that rollercoaster of a sentence, but they managed to stutter out an introduction. “Well, I am Stanislav, and this is Valerie. We are the other two-thirds of Resistance High Command. You are Conrad Rhoades, I assume?”

  “Why most certainly old sport! Though I do prefer to be called ‘TC’,” the lunatic answered cheerily.

  Val chimed in now, more than ready for an explanation, “Alright TC, you said something about an interface, if there was an interface then where’s the body?”

  To that, TC grabbed a fibrous bundle off of the operating table, “Here it is! A human spinal cord and associated nerves. I assume the small lump at the end is what remains of the brain, either through surgical lobotomy or more violent means.”

  Stan stopped him with a raised hand, “So are you telling us that the Inquisitors are just spines?”

  TC laughed before quickly explaining, “Just spines? Preposterous! No, they are an extremely advanced neural interface suit designed solely for the purpose of murdering people, and the suit is controlled by a human nervous system with a severe case of sociopathy. Not just spines lad.”

  “As crazy as it sounds, it checks out guys. We are fighting spines. But the good news is that TC has figured out one way for us to make use of dead Inquisitors, but judging from his comment when we arrived, that number is now two things we can use them for,” Jack explained, “The first being robot soldiers.”

  Stan and Val just stood in shock.

  “What?” Val asked the universe, questioning existence itself, “What do you mean, ‘Robot Soldiers’?”

  TC grabbed a holoprojector out of a pack and put it on the ground, revealing a life-sized replica of an Inquisitor that exploded into its constituent bits for an anatomical breakdown.

  He began to explain himself while pointing at seemingly irrelevant bits of the Inquisitor's anatomy, "See, my idea is that I can probably make a new computerized spinal cord with as advanced of a combat AI as I can cram into it, and in turn give you a robotic soldier.”

  Everyone waited for further explanation, but receiving none from the mad scientist, Stan gave his approval. “Fine, do what you can. Now, tell us what the other idea is, TC.”

  TC started again in his eccentric manner, “We make an exo-suit,” TC paused, then continued, “Basically just some armor that’ll enhance your performance.”

  Stan clapped his arm around TC’s shoulder and laughed heartily, “Now that is an idea I can get behind! Let’s do it!”

  TC was kind of shocked, considering the radical change from Stan, “Aren’t you going to question-”

  Stan stopped him before he said another word, an odd urgency to his actions, “Nope, an exo-suit sounds cool, and much easier to make than a robot. So, I’m giving my full approval to the exo-suit. Anyone disagreeing?” No one offered a challenge to the exo-suit idea, so Stan finished up, “TC, you get to work on these exo-suits, you can ask us for assistance. But we have a job to do, so you’re on your own tonight. Jack, Val, come along, we have a new message.”

  Jack and Val were shocked by a number of things that Stan had just said, but they followed him into the planning room and shut the door, leaving TC to work.

  “Stan, what do you mean, ‘we have a message’?” Val asked in a hurried whisper, “We haven’t had any messages in forever, not since the Inquisition showed up.”

  Stan pulled the phone out of his pocket and put it on the table before speaking matter-of-factly, “Well, tell me what that notification says then. ‘New Message’. From an unknown number. We need to read it.”

  “Well what are we waiting for? Let’s read it!” Jack chirped, and Stan opened the message. “The hell…”

  Etched in black pixels against a white screen, the message read:

  Do you seriously think that you can mess with a multi-billion dollar company and live? You’re dead Cabe. Your friends too. You’re all going to die. I will raze your entire precious city to the ground, and New Columbia will be reborn. You’re just a dead man walking now.

  Yours truly,

  CEO Land.

  They had barely finished reading the message when Alexander Culloch burst through the door of the warehouse.

  Chapter 23

  Alex burst through the door to the warehouse, his clothes torn and his body battered and covered in blood. He held a pendant in his hands, and a wild look was in his eyes, “THE BASTARDS! My.. My…”

  Jack rushed out of the planning room and grabbed hold of him, “Alex! What the hell happened? What… oh no… They didn’t...” he came to a morbid revelation while his hands were on Alex’s bloodied shoulders.

  Alex spoke like a man gone mad, “Oh yes Jack, they did. Right in front of me. Blew up the damned prison with everyone in it too. I am going to kill every last one of them. EVERY LAST ONE!” He rapidly shifted between wretched sobs and the maniacal laughter of a broken man, “You know, they thought they could put a tracker on me and have me bring them here. Nuh-uh, I ripped the damned thing out. They aren’t going to fucking win. NOT IF I HAVE A SAY IN IT!” He raved like a lunatic before collapsing into Jack’s arms, crying. “Aerotec is coming…. They’re coming Jack.”

  With that, Alex passed out and Jack had to lug him into the resistance medical bay. Stan and Val helped him, and an hour later they were discussing their plan.

  Val was up first, and she spoke calmly while going through a mental checklist, “Alright, so we know that Aerotec is mobilizing a force of unknown strength against us. If
I had to guess, I'd say armored personnel carriers, tanks, drones, and whatever else they can scrounge up. We, on the other hand, have exactly 9 operational soldiers, an angry father, Dale and his wife, two kids, the three of us, and a mad scientist. I really hope we all realize just how screwed we are. I mean, do the people even believe in us? Do we even have any support?”

  Stan nodded his head, “Only sort of. From what I can gather from the word on the street, people support us but they don’t realize how desperate we are, and they don’t realize that this is also their fight. We have an army at our fingertips, but they don’t realize they’re an army.”

  Jack offered his opinion, proposing an idea that he had been pondering for a while now, “So what if we do a major propaganda blitz? Include the message about razing the Outer City and use Maria and Lira for propaganda. It won’t take much to incite the people, they just need to know that they can fight too. We have the Inquisitors’ weapons that we can give them if they don’t have any, but 90% of the tools from the mine can be made into weapons that ought to be fairly good against the Inquisitors and other people.”

  Stan considered this, “That will have to do I guess, and it’s not like we have any other choice. We’ll go old World-War-Two-style posters and plaster them across the city while another team distributes pamphlets. Maybe get Culloch in on this too. We can’t afford to have sympathy right now, his story is too ripe for exploitation to let it go to waste.”

  Val tilted her head to the side in thought and twirled a strand of her hair around her finger. Suddenly she sprung to life, a fierce gleam in her gleaming eyes, “I’ll get to work with the kids, Jack can take Culloch, and Stan, you can organize the resistance. Tonight is a race for our lives, and I’m gonna get to work!” She stood up and seemed to talk to herself while she walked to the door. Without another word she rushed off to grab a camera, leaving Jack and Stan to work on the other facets of the newly born operation.

  ...

  By nightfall they had 4 new flyers designed, all focusing on the pain and suffering Aerotec had caused and planned to cause. By midnight, they had enough copies to begin their blitz.

  The first flyer featured Maria imposed over a picture of the Rossnebo mine fire since Rossnebo was a not-so-subtle subsidiary of Aerotec. A message was printed above the scene, “Aerotec killed my parents. Aerotec destroyed my home. And I am not alone.” Besides this, a small statement was printed on the back, asking people to take up arms.

  The message was essentially the same across the others, but each focused on a different point of view. On one of them Culloch -bleeding, broken, and with tears streaming down his face- held a ‘dead’ Lira in his arms, and his personal testimony was printed on the back with a chilling message emblazoned on the picture itself: “Aerotec took my family. Don’t let them take yours.”

  Then there was Jack’s pamphlet, which was a take on a recruitment poster. Standing with his pistol in one hand and his other outstretched towards the viewer, Jack's visage recalled memories of nations banding together to stamp out evil. Emblazoned across the bottom were Jack's own words, “Don’t go silently into the night. I won’t.” On the back were Aerotec’s death threat and instructions for turning tools from the mine into weapons.

  Next up was Stan's, in which he and his personal crew stood as if in battle with their guns outstretched to an off-poster enemy. Upon this one, the message was clearly seen in a blocky Latin font, "For all New Columbia."

  And finally, one featuring the entire resistance, the message loud and clear. “We stand for you, now we ask that you stand with us.”

  The resistance dispersed into the night in a desperate race against Aerotec’s Inquisition. They spread throughout the Outer City, slipping flyers under doors and pinning them to walls as they went. Hopefully, it would be enough to rouse the hearts of the people. If not, then New Columbia was doomed.

  ...

  Jack’s squad was moving through the New Dublin borough when a squad of Inquisitors attempted to stop the resistance in their tracks by opening fire from the rooftops. They immediately killed a young soldier by the name of Hiram Smith, and Jack pulled his remaining two men into a house. As soon as his men were behind cover, he ran back out into the street and grabbed Smith in order to pull him to safety.

  Jack was furious because of this ambush and the death of Smith, and he yelled his frustrations at the Inquisitors, though his rage was ultimately impotent, “You’re all going to die! Every last Inquisitor!” Bullets whizzed past him as he ran with Smith across his shoulders. But his luck ran out when one caught him in the leg and sent him crashing down to the ground. Is this how I die? I don’t think so…

  People were now watching from the windows of their slummy houses, silently hoping that Cabe’s death would be quick. He pulled Smith's broken body off of him and stood up in spite of the hole in his leg. It wasn’t broken. He’d live.

  He pulled his pistol out and loaded it before shouting proudly into the night air, “People of New Columbia! Get up and fight! Aerotec is going to raze this city to the ground, and I won't let that happen! Stand with us or die to Aerotec after they’ve killed the rest of us, I don't care, but I will not go quietly into the night that they have envisioned for us!” He raised his gun and fired at the first Inquisitor he saw before ducking behind the corner of a building, a stream of blood trailing behind him.

  He heard the distinct clang of a pickaxe in his ear as if he was back in the mine slamming his pick into the machine to dislodge a rock. Metal on metal. He looked around and was barely able to recognize a man grabbing him and pulling him into an alley before he passed out from the blood loss.

  …

  Where the hell am I? What the hell is… Am I in a bed? What-

  "Mr. Cabe! Mr. Cabe, are you awake?" Someone was shaking Jack’s arm, and he finally managed to open his eyes. He was welcomed back into reality by a young redheaded and freckled boy.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” Jack mumbled through the tired fog of wakefulness.

  The boy -he was probably about 16 or so- patted Jack’s arm before speaking proudly, “You, Mr. Cabe, are in the New Dublin resistance headquarters. I’m Anthony Connally, my dad, Seamus, is the one in charge around here. I’ll go fetch him. Feel free to drink up.” Anthony gestured to a glass of water on the bedside table before he walked off into another room of the tenement, and Jack was left to wonder about what had just happened. He pulled out his phone and typed a message to Stan and Val to let them know that he was okay.

  Jack had just put his phone down when a burly man walked in and took his hand, “Mornin’ Mr. Cabe, sorry about the odd introductions and the weirdness of all this, but after those Inquisition bastards nearly wiped you from the face of the universe, I figured you wouldn’t quite mind as long as you were alive. I’ve sent my boys to spread the rest of the flyers.” The Irishman shook Jack's hand before sitting down across from him.

  “You’re Seamus, I presume?” Jack asked tentatively, feeling terribly vulnerable. He sat up, aware of the patched-up hole in his leg, “You’re the guy that pulled me out of the firefight while a bunch of ghosts killed the Inquisitors.” It wasn’t so much of a question as it was a statement.

  Seamus smiled broadly, “Yessir Mr. Cabe, I pulled you out while my boys and the rest of our little resistance nailed the robots in the head with picks.”

  “Interesting... “ Jack shook his head a little, “So… what exactly is your resistance? What do you have at your disposal, Mr. Connally?”

  Seamus laughed heartily and answered Jack’s question, “Well, it’s me, my three boys, and our neighbors, Rhonda and Sheppard, as well as the various other families in the borough. We keep the Inquisitors from takin’ anyone else, but from the look of your flyers, we could be doing a whole lot more,” he smiled, his grin reaching from ear to ear, “We want to help, Mr. Cabe. However we can. The New Dublin resistance is at your command.”

  Jack paused, shocked by the mantle that Seamus had placed on him, “Tha
t’s a lot of responsibility you’re shifting on to me, Seamus. Especially if you're trusting me with your entire group like that. I guess if we need anything particular I’ll put in a request with you. We just need fighters, mainly because Aerotec is a hair's breadth away from declaring war on us. And I can’t exactly just take all of you to my headquarters since that’d leave New Dublin undefended.” Jack ran through his thoughts aloud.

  “That isn’t a problem Mr. Cabe, just call on us if you need us. We can be your eyes, ears, and fists.” Seamus explained himself, and within the hour a new alliance was roaming the streets. Seamus and his men escorted Jack back to the Warehouse.

  Chapter 24

  Jack stumbled into the warehouse with the help of Seamus and his son. It was almost dawn and he was quickly met by Stan and Val, who were both very clearly concerned.

  Val rushed to him and put her arms around him, “Jack, what happened out there? You send us a message saying that you’re okay and that you’re gonna be late, and then several hours later you stumble in with two strangers, and you are barely able to stand by yourself because you have a bullet hole in your leg.”

  “It’s fine Val, really. I almost got killed by a squad of Inquisitors, and Mr. Connally here saved me. I’m sorry Val, you know what the stakes are. At least I’m alive,” Jack offered his apology and explanation, “And Mr. Connally here has offered his assistance to the resistance, as well as the services of his local militia. We can use the rest of the local militias that have sprung up too if we can get in touch with them. All they need is a focusing point and people to rally behind. And that’s us.” Jack spoke with triumph in his eyes, using Anthony to hold himself up on his bad side. He had gone from pessimist to optimist within a day.

  Val sighed, He’s running himself ragged with nary a care, “We’ll discuss our communication issues later I guess. Come on, let’s get you fixed up. Stan, you get things sorted out with Mr. Connally here, I need to have a talk with Jack.”