Rebellion at Ailon

by T J Mott

  “Hey! What the—!” The final soldier was still standing in front of the truck, by the open engine compartment. He momentarily popped around the fender, saw Thad and Ria wielding carbines, and ducked back around before either of them could fire.

  “Go right! I’ll go left!” Thad ordered. He moved towards the front of the vehicle as Ria circled around from the back. The soldier popped around the fender again, on Thad’s side, and he heard a couple gunshots. Very loud ones. These soldiers hadn’t been armed with lasers, they had good old-fashioned slug-throwing firearms.

  Thad raised his own weapon in a one-handed grip, quickly snapping off two shots. The first beam hit the truck’s fender, leaving a melted, red-hot hole in the sheet metal. The other struck the soldier in the arm. The soldier made a motion as if yelping and took a step back, disappearing in front of the truck again.

  Thad took several quick steps forward, advancing around the truck’s front side, coming into full view of the soldier just in time to see Ria step around from the other side and fire a quick triple blast. The soldier crumpled to the pavement.

  Clicking his safety on, Thad tucked the carbine back under his left arm. “Are you okay?” he asked, his words sounding incredibly muffled. Ria mouthed something back at him, and then he realized that his ears were ringing. Badly.

  Firearms weren’t terribly common. The noise they created added to the confusion of a battle, and it was very hard to receive new orders during the temporary hearing loss they created. But, they were cheap compared to lasers, and so it made sense to find some of them on a barely-developed backwater world like Ailon.

  Ria quickly closed the distance between them. “I’m fine,” she said in a hurry, her words buried beneath the ringing in Thad’s ears. She started digging at his jacket. He took a step back in surprise, not sure what she was doing. “But you’re hit!” she exclaimed.

  “What?” Thad looked down and saw a small hole in the left flank of his jacket. The fabric around it was slowly turning red.

  Ria tore off his jacket with surprising speed, pushed aside his slung carbine, and lifted his shirt, exposing his scarred abs. There, on his left side, just below his ribs, was a bullet wound that he hadn’t even felt happen.

  Kneeling down to inspect it, Ria wiped at the oozing blood with her jacket sleeve, cleaning it up enough to see. And then she sighed, closing her eyes and nodding in relief. “It’s a shallow fragment. I can see it, it only went in a centimeter or so. Nothing to worry about.”

  He laughed. “Just a scratch.” She let go of his shirt and smiled at him. He reached out, gently stroking her cheek with his flesh-and-blood right hand, and smiled in return. “Hey, you did fine here.” He tilted his head towards the truck beside them. “Let’s get moving and go meet up with our platoon before Avennia realizes we’re at war.”

  He reached into the driver’s seat and yanked out the body there, dumping it onto the pavement. After climbing in to the seat, for some reason he had difficulty getting the door pulled closed. He succeeded after several seconds of fumbling. Must just be nerves, he thought, thinking of the minor bullet wound he now had. But I don’t feel rattled…

  The engine was still running. Once Ria was seated beside him, he gripped the wheel with his left hand, shifted the truck into gear with his right, and started to pull back onto the highway.

  Or tried to, at least. He watched in confusion as he yanked the wheel towards the left, but it just slid past his fingers.

  “Chad, what’s wrong?”

  He frowned, tightening his grip further, but to no effect. His prosthetic fingers simply didn’t obey his commands, remaining loosely folded around the steering wheel with no strength in their grip. That was when he realized he had no sensation at all in that hand. He quickly looked it over, twisting it around in front of him. His fingers and wrist hung limply, as if lifeless, and remained that way when he tried to move him. Then he saw a massive dent in the metal covers of his forearm, with a bullet hole torn through. “I think my hand is busted,” he said mildly, realizing what had happened. One of the soldier’s bullets had struck his arm, fragmented from the impact, and sent shrapnel into his torso.

  “You need me to drive?” she asked.

  He shook his head, switched hands on the wheel, and continued the drive to his platoon’s secret base, hoping they wouldn’t encounter any more trouble on the way.

  ***

  They reached their safehouse without incident. It was a small hostel used by former Foundation volunteers, located in the low-class, tightly-packed residential sectors of Orent where ARF workers and other free Ailonians lived. The hostel’s residents—all members of the Rebel platoon Abram had given Thad to command—unloaded the truck, moving very quickly to minimize the chances of anyone seeing the operation and realizing what was going on. Then two of them left to return the truck to the ARF motor pool.

  Thad sat in a chair in the hostel’s kitchen, shirtless, while Ria cleaned his wound. It really was nothing more than a scratch, and she removed the shrapnel fragment effortlessly. “You really need to learn to quit getting hurt,” she said while applying a small bandage after stitching it closed. “You have so many scars already. How many more will you have in another twenty years?”

  He shrugged, and then she turned her attention towards his nonfunctional prosthetic hand. He watched in fascination as she deftly removed a set of cover plates with a small screwdriver. The damaged plates—dented and with a bullet hole torn through—took quite a bit of force to break free after the screws holding it in place were removed. It all felt extremely odd through the prosthetic’s sensors, at least in the parts that still seemed to work. All of his hand and parts of his forearm felt completely dead, and the sensations he could still feel seemed scrambled somehow.

  She sat on her knees in front of him and leaned in close so she could look down into the forearm’s compartments. “The power supply is fine. Though I already knew that since you weren’t bleeding.”

  He frowned, not understanding. “Why would a prosthetic bleed?”

  “Because it’s powered by your blood?” she replied. “You didn’t know that?” He shook his head. “It’s tapped right into your radial and ulnar arteries, and drains into your basilic vein. It uses minerals from your bloodstream to generate power. That way you don’t ever have to recharge batteries.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  She looked up at him and frowned a bit. “You also have to watch your zinc and magnesium levels. It’s pretty easy for them to get too low, and when that happens the prosthetic will lose power and you might suffer some mineral deficiency. Your doctor didn’t tell you any of this?”

  He compressed his lips, shook his head, and shrugged. “I’m surprised you know so much about prosthetics.”

  She huffed. “I am a nurse,” she replied in annoyance, “and I was studying to become a doctor before the world went crazy.” She worked her small fingers into the opening left by one of the panels she’d removed, reaching into the tight space within his forearm. “Ailon may be a backwater hellhole with a substandard medical industry, but even we aren’t too developmentally-stunted to get basic Praxis Cybertronics parts like this.” She poked at something, and suddenly all remaining sensation in his forearm disappeared.

  “What was that?”

  “The power switch. I turned it off.” She grabbed the screwdriver again and gently worked on something inside—Thaddeus couldn’t really see from his vantage point, nor would he know what he was looking at. He knew his way around reactors and thrusters pretty well. Body replacement parts, not so much. But as he watched her work, he was amazed by her dexterity and attention to detail. Her talents were definitely being wasted as a basic nurse, he thought. She ought to be a surgeon.

  She withdrew quite a few screws from inside and then grabbed his limp, lifeless fingers with both of her hands. And she tugged. And to his surprise, his arm fell off. Most of it, anyway. Only the power supply and the framework anchored into the remains
of his forearm bones remained. A few loose wires hung out, dangling grotesquely from the power supply. Ria unplugged them, coiled them up, and set them aside.

  He was trying to think of a clever way to tease her for ripping off his hand, but she spoke first. “It’s much easier to work on when it isn’t attached to the patient.”

  “So what’s wrong with it?” he asked.

  “It got shot by a gun,” she spat back sharply with an annoyed look. But after a couple seconds she flashed him a grin, and he realized she was just teasing him. “The main cable connector on the hand section is destroyed. I can also see some damage to casing of the wrist servo, but I won’t know if it’s still good until I can disassemble it further.” She finally stood up, still holding his detached hand. “Once I know more, I’ll see about getting replacement parts through Foundation channels. Hopefully that isn’t too difficult after today’s events.”

  “Yeah, starting a war tends to disrupt things,” he said, mostly to fill the silence as he morbidly examined his arm. His flesh ended about ten centimeters below his elbow. Two short metal rods extended from the stump, as if continuing the natural bones of his forearm. Attached to them was the pair of sturdy, ring-shaped frameworks that mechanically supported the rest of the prosthetic from the inside. The device’s power supply box was safely nestled within the framework, covered in a number of tiny plastic electrical sockets used to distribute power and to interface the sensors and motors with his nervous system. Three small stainless steel hoses snaked out of the metal bones and into the power supply, probably the bloodstream taps and nerve interconnect, if he had to guess.

  “In the meantime, get used to only having one hand. It could be a while.” She paused, chewing on her lower lip for a moment while casting a worried expression at him. “Like you said, things will be disrupted around here.”

  He nodded and stood. Then, on a whim, he briefly took her in a one-armed embrace before heading out of the kitchen.

  Ailon was now at war, even if most of its inhabitants didn’t quite realize it yet. There was much work to be done. Starting with, he realized, finding himself a new shirt.

  Chapter 21

  The past day had been relatively uneventful and yet extraordinarily stressful at the same time. The Ailonian Rebels in Thad’s hostel were wound up tight with anxiety. Nobody had any real news, although Army and police vehicles constantly patrolled the streets outside while blaring the message that Orent was on lockdown and everyone was to stay inside.

  The hostel had a cramped single-room unfinished basement, the door to which was hastily hidden behind a bookshelf in the sleep room. The basement itself was dark and dirty, with no windows to the outside and only a single light in the ceiling. Crates of supplies and weapons filled over half of the room, some of it stocked here well in advance, and the rest coming from the shipment Thad and Ria had stolen the day before. In the middle of the remaining space, a pair of crates formed an ad-hoc table, and an electronic flatscreen covered it.

  Along another wall, a row of crates pretended to be a workbench, piled up with radio equipment, notebooks, codebooks, a couple laser pistols, and an odd assortment of junk. Including a partially-disassembled prosthetic hand and forearm.

  Thad stood at that workbench, trying to follow the codebook and get the radio reprogrammed to the Council’s frequency and encryption settings. The radio was like nothing he’d ever used before. It operated at a very long wavelength, which in theory would make it difficult to localize by sensors—a very important feature for the new Rebels. But as a result, its bandwidth was low and audio links could be nearly unintelligible at times.

  The codebook contained a variety of radio schemes and settings, allowing the Rebels to communicate relatively securely. But it was not straightforward. Most of the cipher settings were intentionally slightly wrong in case the book fell into enemy hands, and so the radio operators needed to memorize the corrections in order to make use of them. “This thing is so damn archaic,” Thad muttered under his breath. It had a very simple text-only display composed of a tiny four-line monochrome LCD, with a few rotary knobs to act as input selectors for the device’s settings. “It’s like a relic from the battlefields of 1916 Europe.”

  “What’s going on?” Ria’s gentle voice interrupted his thoughts as she stepped up beside him and rested a hand on his bicep.

  He shook his head in annoyance at himself. “Nothing. Just talking to myself.” He finished inputting another cipher code. “I think I’ve got it.” Picking up a nearby cable, he plugged it into the radio’s I/O port. Then, he stretched it out and connected the other end to the flatscreen that lay on the crate table in the middle of the room. It successfully synced to the radio and displayed the channel status. It was an analog audio channel with a low-rate bitstream encoded above five kilohertz, allowing the channel users to both talk and transmit basic text or files to each other.

  He felt uneasy about the radio’s simple scrambling scheme, knowing that any decent computer with the right software would be able to crack it within seconds. Ailon’s tech standards, especially those available to free Ailonians, were extremely subpar compared to the rest of the galaxy. But they didn’t have much choice. The Rebels needed to communicate, and this system was the most secure one they were able to find on the local black markets.

  He eyed the group of people standing around the table. His platoon’s staff were all present. Himself, as commander. Chet Savoy was his platoon sergeant and second-in-command. Ria and Jason were the platoon medics and otherwise Thad’s assistants. Harve, also a former member of Ria’s clinic, was present as a squad leader, and a man named Kole was in charge of the platoon’s other squad. The rest of his three-squad platoon was either upstairs in the hostel’s main floor or stationed in other nearby buildings.

  “Messier, checking in,” he announced towards the screen’s audio pickup.

  “Excellent,” came a crackly, low-fidelity response through the radio channel. The audio quality was terrible, but he thought he recognized Rhena’s voice. “I call this session into order. First, a briefing on the situation in Orent from Culper.”

  “Transmitting a background data dump now,” Culper said. “Orent is on complete lockdown by order of the Governor. The streets are under heavy patrol by the Ailon Federal Police Force, with support from the Avennian Army. All vehicles not belonging to the Army or AFPF are being stopped, searched, and questioned while the government works to figure out what happened yesterday. Otherwise, things seem very quiet and we’re continuing to monitor the regime’s response.”

  “Thank you,” Rhena said. “Ron?”

  Thad heard a tired sigh through the channel. “The Ailon Relief Foundation has been formally taken over by the Avennian regime. At 2000 hours yesterday, Army soldiers stormed the headquarters campus and assumed control of the organization. All essential Rebel leadership were safely off-site. The Army is searching the Foundation’s facilities across the city, looking for the matèriel that was stolen yesterday. Reports from the inside tell us that the regime is reorganizing the Foundation. It will continue its standard operations under close scrutiny by Army personnel. Standard Foundation logistics are at a standstill for the moment.

  “In addition, the majority of slave-operated facilities in and around Orent are experiencing a complete shutdown while the Foundation is reorganized. Right now, we’re not sure if the slaves are even getting fed without us.”

  Thad grimaced. He’d known that the Ailonian slaves might soon fall into neglect if the Foundation was shut down. But he hadn’t necessarily expected it to happen on Day One. Hopefully, the reorganization would go quickly, for their sake.

  “Abram?”

  Abram’s cranky voice crackled loudly through the radio. “All twenty-five Rebel platoons have checked in. They are ordered to stand by until Culper and I have looked at our intel and decided on an action. Otherwise, the Army is on high alert. They’re doing searches of businesses and properties owned by free Ailonians. And a
lot of things are being confiscated without reimbursement in retribution for yesterday.”

  “Lyra?”

  “We’re coordinating with a few Rebel members who are still with the ARF in order to assure a smooth transition during the takeover. We can’t forget that there’s a large slave population which is almost completely dependent on the Foundation, and I want to make sure they are taken care of for the duration of our war.”

  “Messier?”

  Thad cleared his throat. “My platoon is safely in hiding, and as reported through other channels earlier, we managed to acquire two hundred additional laser carbines during our operation yesterday. Otherwise, I will be working with Culper and Abram to figure out our next moves.”

  “Very good. Does anyone else have anything to add?” A long pause. “No? Very well. Culper and Messier may stay on the channel until their data download is complete. Good luck.”

  One by one, names dropped from the channel list. Thad muted their own radio and heaved a sigh. “Still not much for us to do,” he said. He looked at Chet. “I guess our platoon takes it easy until something comes up. Remain alert, of course,” he added.

  Chet nodded, and Thad climbed the steep staircase back to the hostel’s main floor.

  ***

  The basement cleared out quickly. Chet stayed behind to monitor the data transmission from Culper, and soon only he and Ria were there. “Chet,” she said, “does the name Europe mean anything to you?”

  He squinted and looked to the ceiling, thinking. After a moment he shook his head. “No, why?”

  “Chad muttered something about battlefields of Europe while working on the radio.”

  Chet raised an eyebrow. “You think it’s important?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was thinking maybe he slipped and said something he didn’t want to. Maybe he was in a war there? It could be something to look into.”