by Rachel Ford
“Squad, your orders are to offer support to the Tribari people against hostile forces. Any ship that opens fire on them is to be taken down. Do you understand?” Silence reigned on the comm for about fifteen seconds. He repeated, “I said, do you copy?”
A swarm of copy that’s and yessir’s filled the line now.
Not everyone copied, though. Lt. Dagir’s voice came on the line. “Sir, that was a direct order. You can’t just ignore it.”
“You’re welcome to try to stop me, Dagir,” he said calmly. “But I stand by my decision. We took an oath to protect the people of this city. Not fire on them.”
Then, he turned back to his terminal, and pressed the transmit button. He saw the progress bar race forward as he broadcast the files he’d selected into the public domain: thousands of records related to the riots, to Trapper’s Colony, to the Office of Protection. He’d barely scratched the surface of them, these past few days, but it was enough to tell a story that the public had the right to know. There was a reason they’d been classified.
What the hell. How about a side of espionage with my treason charges? If he was going to earn himself a one-way ticket to Zeta Colony, he might as well pull out all the stops along the way.
Nikia was thunderstruck by the words she heard projected from the fighters hovering overhead. “It’s a trick,” she thought aloud. “It’s got to be.”
“Maybe not,” Giya said. “Either way, Nik, there’s only one thing we can do: move forward.”
She gulped, and with a voice that trembled called, “Justice for Grel.”
“Justice for Grel,” Giya repeated, his tone loud.
The cry picked up behind them, and Nikia marched onward. She fully expected to be gunned down as she stepped over the border.
Nothing happened.
She took another step, and then another. She was running now across the greens, the sound of sirens in the distance, the padding of hundreds of feet behind her. “Justice for Grel!” she called again.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Drop your weapons,” she cried. “Hands in the air.” They’d reached the cemetery, and now the protectors found themselves surrounded by a mass of Tribari as far as the eye could see.
Someone reached for a gun, and a warning shot whizzed past him.
“Hands up,” Nikia ordered. “We’re not here to kill anyone. We’re here to arrest Sergeant Dru, Officers Kaldu, Greylor and Ilia. No one else needs to be involved.”
“Fire,” Dru was calling. “Fire on these terrorists.”
“The first man or woman to pull a gun dies,” Giya warned.
There were several dozen protectors here, all decked out in their dress uniforms. They had no riot gear now, no submission prods and battle rifles. Those who were armed carried only pistols.
“Not so courageous,” Giya grinned, “when they’re not the only ones with guns.”
“Sergeant Dru,” Nikia called out, “on behalf of the citizens of the City, I order you to surrender yourself for arrest, to be tried for conspiracy to murder Grel Idan.
“Officer Kaldu, Officer Greylor, Officer Ilia: on behalf of the citizens-”
She cut off suddenly as Dru reached for his pistol. “Go to hell, terrorists.”
Shots rang out in all directions. “Get down,” Giya said, pulling her to the ground. She reached into her pocket for her pistol, and aimed for the sergeant.
She blinked. The spot where he’d been was empty. In place of a man, standing tall and proud, lay a body running with streams of blue. Beams of electricity arced this way and that as officers fired at the crowd and the crowd fired at the officers.
For half a minute, she watched in unthinking astonishment. Their arrest had gone from an orderly victory to a chaotic massacre in the blink of an eye. She saw a young man go down, clutching a wound in his leg. She blinked again. She recognized his face.
It was Officer Pyr, the young man who had saved her from Ridi. She saw his features contort in pain. She saw the blood streaming from his wound.
Her reason came back, and she pushed to her feet. “Cease fire,” she called. “Cease fire. For the love of the gods, cease fire!”
The shots slowed around her, then stopped. She walked forward, toward the officers. Footsteps sounded behind her. Some of the protectors threw down their weapons and raised their hands in surrender. Others seemed poised to run or fight as the situation necessitated. Kaldu, she saw, was dead. Officers Greylor and Ilia were dragged to their feet by members of the crowd.
“We should leave no survivors,” Giya counseled quietly. “We could wipe out the entire Office of Protection today, right here, now.”
She recoiled at the words. “That’s not what we agreed to, Giya.”
“No, but Nik, when opportunity knocks, don’t be afraid to answer.”
She looked him up and down, and then returned her eyes to the officers. “I see a different opportunity. Not for death, but for life.” Everyone seemed to be looking to her, so she called, “Take their guns.”
Her own steps led her to Officer Pyr. It hadn’t been a deliberate decision, unless it had been on a subconscious level. But the sight of him writhing in his own blood reminded her of a time when she had writhed, and he had stepped to her aid.
“They’d kill you in a heartbeat, Nik. All of us,” Giya was continuing.
“Some of them,” she agreed. “But not all, Giya.” What were protectors, but Tribari like him and her, after all – men and women of flesh and blood, hopes and desires, good and evil? She had come to see justice done against the evil. She had not come for vengeance on the good.
She reached the young man now, and he recoiled as she knelt, reaching for a weapon he’d dropped. “Don’t,” she said. He swallowed fearfully but stopped moving. She looked over his wound. Then, she turned to the crowd behind her. “Do we have a doctor?”
No one moved. She tried again. “Is there a doctor among us?”
A woman stepped out of the crowd, timidly at first. “I’m a doctor.”
“This man is bleeding,” she said. “Can you help him?”
The doctor glanced at Pyr and then at Nikia. “Yes,” she said in a moment.
“Will you do it?” Nik pressed. “Please?”
She nodded.
“Thank you.” She stood now, and spoke as much to the crowd as to Pyr. “We came for justice, not vengeance. The officers we’ve named have killed. There are others. We will find them, we will try them. We will see that they come to justice too. But we are not come to answer murder with murder.” She looked down at Officer Pyr. “We are not your enemies. We are your neighbors.”
She glanced around the cemetery, at the officers disarmed, at the crowd of so many. Then she turned to Giya. Her friend was frowning, but she felt her own heart trembling with excitement. “It’s started, Giya.”
“What’s started, Nik? We’re letting them go. We might stop them today, but they’ll be back tomorrow. And this time, they won’t leave survivors.”
“No,” she shook her head. “No, Giya. We’re not done. We’re far from done.”
His frown lessened, but still he seemed skeptical. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, our people are languishing in cells in the Office of Protection. We need to get them out.”
A sparkle lit his eyes. “Yes. And liberate some of those weapons and some of that armor too.”
She grinned. “Yes. And then we march on Parliament.”
“Parliament?” His eyes widened. “Holy hell, Nik. What’s gotten into you?”
“This is our chance, Giya. We strike now, or – as you say – they recall the protectors from the provinces, from the colonies. More gunships, more guns.” She shook her head. “We act now. We strike now. And we will win.”
He shook her round the shoulders. “My gods, Nik. If Grel could see you now.”
“He may see me sooner than you think,” she said with a laugh of exuberant excitement. “But, dammit, let’s do this if we can.”
He nodded. “You talk to them, Nik. The people. They followed you this far. You led them to victory. They’ll follow you further.”
“What do I say?” She’d said already what she had to say. What more was there?
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be profound. Just enough to keep them fighting, Nik.”
She shook her head, and then paused. She remembered the fold of paper in her breast pocket, and she reached for it.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
She withdrew the page and stared at it. “Grel’s speech,” she said, and her voice was soft. “It’s Grel’s speech.”
He nodded again. “That’s perfect, Nik. Perfect.”
She faced the crowd, and Giya called for quiet. She glanced at the paper, and then back at the expectant faces. “My husband wrote this,” she said, and her voice shook as she spoke. “He was planning to deliver it at the park just over that hill. Just days ago.” She frowned at the memory, and shook her head. “It seems like much longer than that. But it was just days.
“He’ll never give his speech. He was murdered, by the men we’ve arrested today. But it’s a good speech, and it deserves to be heard. It was a good enough speech that they’d kill him to stop him from giving it, from telling the truths he told.”
Her voice caught, and for a moment she fought to regain her composure. Then she slipped the paper back in place and recited his words. “We are a people that has been turned against itself. We are a people that has been taught that up is down and down is up, that sloth is industry and industry is sloth, that greed is a reasonable demand and reasonable demands are greed.”
She had found her pacing now, and the words came easily. “The smartest thing the Contributors ever did was convince us that we needed them. But tell me, who really needs who? If we vanish into the mist tomorrow, we stop making their food, and cleaning their houses, and working their factories. How do they survive?
“But if they vanished tomorrow, they’d no longer control the land and the water and the air. They’d stop privatizing and monetizing everything around us, and paying us a pittance to get any of it back.”
Knowing nods and calls of amen ran through the crowd.
“So what would we do? I’ll tell you what we’d do: we’d do what we always do.
“We’d work the land and sail the waters and produce the goods, and live – except we’d live on the fruits of our labor, instead of giving it all to them. We wouldn’t work for pittance until our bodies failed.”
She turned her eyes to the crowd, pausing a moment to let the full effect of Grel’s words hit them. “Without them, we would thrive. And without us, they would not survive.
“Because it’s us, we the people, who do all the work, and reap almost none of the profits. And it’s they who do none of the work and reap almost all the profits.
“So you tell me: who are the real contributors?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When she wrapped up his words, she spoke her own. They weren’t anything she’d prepared in advance, but in the moment, she felt them keenly. “My husband spoke often of economic justice.
“Today, we came here for justice of a more tangible kind. But justice is justice. The same forces that convince us that we need to earn access to clean water, that our lives count by proportion to our bank accounts, are the same forces that send protectors to kill those who challenge the status quo.
“By law, we’re granted the rights to assemble, the right to speech, the right to choose our own government.
“And yet, under cover of legality, those who assemble are carried off, those who speak are killed. And when, by the gods, have we had a say, a real say, in the makeup of our parliament?”
“Never,” Giya called. A ripple of agreement sounded from the crowd, and with it anger.
“How many of you were able to vote last election? How many could afford to get off from work? How many could wait the hours it takes, in our part of the City, to cast a ballot?”
She shook her head. “You know me. I’m the daughter of Grand Contributors. I’ve lived on that side of the walls before. I’ve hidden behind those locked gates from the protectors this very week. My parents still live there. They’re good people. Truly, they are. And I’m the widow of Grel Idan. If I live long enough, I’ll be the mother of his child.
“So when I say I know both sides of this economy, I do. The politicians will tell you that men like my husband, people like us, just want blood and chaos. They’ll say we want to murder and loot and take what we haven’t earned. That’s not what we want. We want justice, not vengeance. We don’t want to take their lives – we just want a system that won’t take ours.”
Giya threw his hands together in applause, and the crowd did likewise. When they quieted, she spoke again. “So I’m going to the Office of Protection. Our people are still there, locked in cages like animals – for no greater crime than demanding their rights. I’m going there to free them.”
She lifted her voice to be heard over the cheering. “And then I march on parliament, to turn out those representatives who refuse to represent us.”
“For decades, they’ve been calling reformers revolutionaries. And now they’re killing the reformers. Well, dammit, maybe it’s time for a revolution then.”
Liberation
Tribari Freedom Chronicles, Book Three
By Rachel Ford
Chapter One
“Tell me, Protector: how do you want to die?”
Tal Imari kept his eyes on the rock he was sorting. His ears burned, tracking the movements of the group behind him. They were close. Not close enough to touch him – yet – but close.
“I’m talking to you, Protector.”
He glanced behind, now. Avoidance was no longer an option. Never by choice, he’d played this game one too many times to be in doubt of how it worked. Nor did he need to see the other men to know who was speaking, or who would be with him.
It was Ket Ibar, and the three roughs who shadowed him: Manis the Mute, Trel Triden, and Fat Cal. Ket was watching him with a familiar grin. It had been a few days since they’d tangled, and the other man was itching for a rematch.
Tal held onto his hand axe. He’d use it, if he had to. There’d been a time when the thought of smashing another Tribari’s skull in with an axe would have chilled him to the core. But that had been before Zeta. That had been before he’d been sent to this frozen penal colony, before he’d been surrounded by murderers and rapists and criminals of every stripe. “I’m working, Ket. Leave me alone.” He said it numbly, going through the motions but knowing full well it would make no difference.
Ket’s grin broadened, his eyes darkening from their usual gold to an eager sandy brown. He nodded, and Manis and Cal descended on Tal.
The protector – former protector – stepped to the side, so that his back was to the tunnel rather than the wall. He raised his axe.
Cal reached him first. Despite the nickname, he was far from fat. Maybe in his days on Central it had been otherwise. Nowadays, on Zeta colony, he was as lean as anyone else. Despite the ravages of cold and hunger, he was still huge, with a giant barrel chest and a good foot of height on the rest of his party.
Manis was shorter, but stockier. And mean. On Central, Manis had been a low-level black-market dealer. Scuttlebutt was that he’d threatened a protector on the take, and they’d cut out his tongue to keep him from talking. It was a brutal kind of efficiency, as symbolic as it was effective.
Tal couldn’t say if the rumors were true or not. What he did know was that – somehow – Manis had lost his tongue, and he had an abiding hatred of protectors. A hatred that, with no better outlet, came to focus on Tal these days.
He swung his axe for Cal, warning, “Back off.”
The other man hesitated, but Manis pushed on. Tal brought his axe back up, swinging for the mute now.
It was at this precise moment that a broad arm wrapped around Tal’s throat, and a gr
eat hand seized his weapons arm. His attention shifted as he felt pressure increase on his trachea, as his breath was suddenly arrested. He grabbed for the arm, fingers clawing at his unseen attacker. Manis wrenched the axe out of his hand.
They struggled for a few moments, Manis and Cal throwing a punch here and there to subdue him. Ket walked forward, with Trel close on his heels. The former was smiling. “I found a friend of yours, Protector. I thought you’d like to get reacquainted.”
“Remember me?”
He shivered at the voice in his ear. He was choking with oxygen deprivation, and panic was seizing at his consciousness. But Tal Imari would always recognize that voice.
Efron Engel. Efron had been one of his toughest cases, not just tough to crack, but tough to work. A brutal serial rapist, Engel had left a trail of battered and tortured women and men behind him on the Tribari home world, Central.
He’d been the one to interview those who had survived, to hear the grim details time and again, to visit the grisly scenes of the crimes as he pursued this monster.
It had been a long time since Tal prayed. But in the moment, he prayed with all the frantic desperation of a man who feared worse than death. He struggled harder, kicked and clawed and writhed with every last ounce of strength.
And all the while, Ket kept smiling. “I knew you two would want to meet again. Well, Efron, we’ll leave you to it. My men’ll watch the tunnel. Just to make sure no one interrupts your reunion.”
“Please,” Tal choked out. He had had no quarrel, no prior dealings, with Ket and his men. They’d picked him out because he was – had been – a protector. He’d been a target to men like this since he’d stepped foot on Zeta. Any disgraced constable would find himself in the same situation. He’d taken his beatings when they’d come, meeting out what violence he could in his own defense. But this?
This was a horror he’d not anticipated.