Covenant

by Andreas Christensen

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “I don’t know you, personally, sir. But I do think I know your unit,” she said. He gestured for her to get in the car, and they drove off. Sue didn’t look back. She hoped she would never see the Corpus again, ever.

  “The Luna Brigade has been ordered to take you away. It came directly from Counselor Novak. You are coming with us, Miss Atlas.”

  Dave

  The world was spinning, but Dave pushed through. The haze covering his surroundings lifted, and he began to make sense of where he was and what he was doing there. It was early morning, and mist covered the ground. He lay on the bank of a small stream and shivered in the cold. He lifted his throbbing head and looked at the fence a hundred meters off. The Belt. He had crossed it.

  He groaned as the pain returned. His right leg was torn to pieces, of that much he was certain. He looked down and saw a mass of blood, shreds of fabric, and something he couldn’t identify. He didn´t dare take his boot off to check, though, not now. But it wasn’t his leg that was causing most of the pain. The leg felt just like his head did, a throbbing, dull ache. It was the skin on his thighs near his groin and most of his upper body that was more painful. He wasn’t sure whether it was from the mine fragments or the barbed wire, but either way, his body was covered in cuts, and he was bleeding from several of them.

  He turned his head and saw the outline of a city in the distance.

  “Charlestown,” he whispered. He could hear voices and remembered that he’d have to be careful. He didn’t have to worry about Corpus headhunters, but the officers on this side could be just as bad. He had to get away.

  He managed to roll over into a squat, ensuring he put most of his weight on his left leg, and pushed himself up. He tried to put some weight on his right leg. It held for a second or two before it gave way. It was still not the worst of the pain, but there was no way he’d be able to walk all the way to Charlestown. But he’d crawl if he had to.

  Dave gritted his teeth and mustered whatever willpower he had left, and took a step with his good leg. He then inched his right foot forward and put just enough weight on it to take a quick stride with his left. So this was how it was going to be. He did it again. And again. He repeated this for as long as he could, and then he crawled for a few minutes.

  He looked back and saw that he had made some progress. His head felt light, and he was thirsty as hell. But he ignored it as he got up once again. He looked at the city as if it was the only thing of importance in this world. Whatever it took, he would get there.

  Sue

  The airfield was just a fifteen-minute drive away, and neither Sue nor her escort said anything as they drove through fields where Corpus fieldworkers were harvesting, line upon line of people, the Whips overseeing their work. Sue shuddered and looked away. She noticed the driver looking at her in the rearview mirror, a worried look on her face. Sue tried to look nonchalant, but she was a terrible actor.

  A few minutes later, they arrived at the airfield. A scramjet was standing ready nearby, and when Sue got out of the steam car, she realized she would get to fly this thing. The meridian said a few words to the driver and the other soldier, who remained by the car.

  “Come on,” he said to her, and motioned for her to walk toward the scramjet. She wasn’t familiar with all the types of aircraft that the Covenant had at their disposal, but she recognized the multi-purpose weapons platform standing in front of her. It was one of the most powerful weapons of the Covenant, capable of carrying nuclear weapons and able to cover the distance from the northern border to the Floral Sea in thirty minutes. One such scramjet could easily level a town like Charlestown in a single strike.

  “Where is the pilot?” she asked. The meridian turned and grinned at her.

  “You’re looking at him,” he said. Then, to her surprise, he extended his hand.

  “Meridian Shukov,” he said. She shook his hand. He already knew her name, of course, so she remained silent. So the officer was also a pilot. Seemed the Luna Brigade trained their people well.

  A helmet lay waiting for her on the front seat. She put it on, and then strapped herself in. Shukov sat right behind her. He spoke into the helmet comms system.

  “Make sure the airflow symbol is green at all times,” he said. She gave him a thumbs-up.

  Meridian Shukov then continued to go through a checklist, sometimes addressing her and sometimes just ticking off items for the control tower. It took him less than five minutes, and he seemed to be taking his time. Perhaps that was just the way one should go through the checklist; calm and easy. The tower spoke back to him a few times, with questions she didn’t comprehend, but she understood they were checking a list of their own, as well. Then the craft began moving, and suddenly, it lifted into the air, slowly but surely. There was a little more shaking than with the airships, but nothing uncomfortable. Once they were about a hundred meters up, Shukov spoke to her.

  “Hang tight, Miss Atlas. Here we go.” And then, without warning, the ship tilted slightly, pointing toward the sky. A rocket ignited, and she was pressed back in her seat as the scramjet took off, quickly gaining altitude. Within a couple of minutes, they were passing through the clouds, and then, when she looked out, she thought she could almost see the curvature of the Earth.

  “Are... Are we in space?” she said. Meridian Shukov chuckled.

  “No, not quite. But we are in the upper layers of the atmosphere.”

  A couple of minutes later he spoke again. “We’ll be passing your hometown right about... now.”

  Sue looked out, but all she could see were the clouds beneath her, sometimes broken by patches of brown and a dull green through the cloud cover.

  “We’ll be landing in about ten minutes. Starting descent in six,” Shukov said.

  “Where are we going?” Sue asked, not expecting an answer. To her surprise, though, Shukov did answer.

  “We’ll be landing right next to Legacy Spaceport. From there, we are to board the next shuttle to Luna.”

  Mark

  Mark checked his watch. Sue should be in the air by now, en route by scramjet from the Corpus airfield near Atlantis. She’d be in Legacy within minutes. She wouldn’t enter the city proper, though, not this time. The shuttle should be fueled and ready to take off as soon as she arrived, taking her off planet within minutes. There was no way Ivanov or anyone else would be able to stop her.

  Once she was off planet, Mark would have to have a serious chat with Head Servant Lunde. Unless the Covenant leadership began seriously considering changing the status of the English, they would discover themselves spread too thin faster than they could even imagine. With the northern expansion, that process was already underway, and with the threat from the west, it should be obvious. The Moon people couldn’t hope to maintain the status quo for much longer, and unless they wanted an uprising, they needed to make some significant changes.

  Sue was already known all over the Covenant. A heroine of the Janissaries, the perfect symbol of English and Moon people working together, if the latter played their cards right. If not, she could just as well end up the perfect symbol for an English uprising, one that could actually gain some ground, especially if mysterious agents from the west decided to back them. Mark had no doubt they would, and his own sources reported movement deep inside Covenant territory, from the Rift delta in the South to the deep woods of the North. Besides, whether it succeeded or not, an uprising would quickly become a blood bath, and the consequences would be unpredictable, to say the least. And after recent events in the North, it would surprise him if nobody, threatened by an English uprising, considered disposing of the English the way they had the French.

  Mark was torn, still not knowing where the next move would come from. The game could end up with the Moon people conquering the world, or it could end with their ultimate downfall. It depended on so many factors, but he had a strong feeling that some of the key players would be Susan Atlas and Evan Hordvik, perh
aps even Dave Wagner. He didn’t know where young Wagner was at the moment, but Hordvik should already be on Luna, and soon Sue would be safely off planet, as well.

  He chuckled, as he considered the situation. Susan Atlas would soon come to recognize the heart of the Moon people. Then the next round could begin.

  Chapter 7

  Renee

  Renee felt the pressure of tears threatening, and decided she had had enough of holding back. She let them flow as she stepped into the water. The steps of the underwater bridge were just a few centimeters under; deep enough to be hidden from view, but shallow enough to tread steadily.

  One of the Buchanan Rangers fumbled underwater with his hand before he found what he was looking for. He pulled a lever, and a series of poles rose up. He pulled another lever, and a rope stretched taut between them, making a handrail that stretched from their side of the Rift to the other. Renee smiled broadly as Captain Lee came and stood beside her.

  “So, you ready to come home with us?” he said warmly. Renee took a step out, holding the handrail, then another. In the distance, she heard the rumble of a waterfall, and she knew the currents were strong. The underwater bridge was steady, though.

  Crossing the Rift proved easy enough once they had Captain Lee and his men guiding them. A hidden path about a kilometer to the north of where they had been attacked had taken them down to the river. Once they reached the bottom, Captain Lee had explained there was an artificial crossing-an underwater bridge-that would let them walk across.

  “We built quite a few of these. To let our scouts pass. Besides, once we decide to do something about our eastern neighbors, we’ll need them to move heavy equipment quickly,” he’d told her.

  As Renee walked across, she dreamed of the day she would walk in the opposite direction, with an army out for revenge. It might be years, she thought, but she would be there. For now though, she was happy to have brought the remainder of her people to safety.

  Once she stepped out on the west bank, she turned and watched the rest of her people follow. She noticed little Caroline stepping across, light as a feather, while her mother seemed more worried. Both smiled at her once they made it across, and Renee felt thankful, once again, that even in the darkest of moments, something good might happen.

  Two transport aircraft stood waiting for them, while rangers surrounded the area, watching every direction, making sure the French were safe. Captain Lee explained that there was only room for fifty passengers each on the transports, so it would take several flights before everyone was safe.

  “I’ll stay here until the last flight,” Renee said, but the captain shook his head.

  “We need you to organize the refugees once we get to Buchanan,” he said. “Besides, many here have probably never flown before. Seeing you do it first, should put them at ease.”

  Renee nodded, not having the energy to argue. She was happy, but tired, and she felt like she could sleep for a week.

  Evan

  Evan sat looking out the view port of the transport vehicle as it drove across the dusty landscape toward the domes in the distance. He had almost a week before he had to report for his formal entry into the Brigade, and he didn’t intend to spend that time moping around in a military facility. He had family in Nidaros, and he thought this would be a good time to check in on the family estate.

  He’d landed close to Luna Brigade HQ, a good half-day’s ride from the Twin cities of New Moscow and Nidaros. He found it amusing that nobody had decided to merge the two cities into one and give it a new name, something that could have broken with their Earthly ancestry, as he’d have expected. From everything he’d learned of the Youth Revolution, all memory of the founding nations of the lunar settlement should have been wiped out of history, to be reborn into this myth of the Moon people. He remembered that his father had once lamented the joining of the two projects, back before the Youth Revolution, saying that Nidaros, from which the Hordviks stemmed, had become all but dominated by its bigger twin. Evan wasn’t so sure about that, and from the names of the powerful families, he’d say it wasn’t much of a difference anymore. The Moon people were long ago merged into one, and most, such as Head Servant Lunde, stemmed equally from both ancestries.

  The English didn’t learn these things, of course, so for all they knew, the Moon people were actually from the Moon. He looked around, chuckling silently. The dust of Luna was among the most hostile environments one could imagine. Only ignorance would make anyone believe this dead rock could give birth to life. But, once settled, it had given birth to a people, a harsh, ruthless people, conquerors, rulers. His people.

  Evan had been to Luna several times before, years ago. The first time had been with his father, as a kid. It was the funeral of his older brother, Victor, the one who should have inherited the family name. Victor, as much an individualist as Evan, had commanded a special intelligence team of the Luna Brigade, which had fallen into an ambush deep inside enemy territory, west of the Rift. Nobody had ever been able to retrieve his body. Nevertheless, the funeral had been grand, observing all the ancient rites, as befell a Hordvik. Evan never saw his father cry at the funeral.

  His mother had been long gone by then, an accident when Evan was no more than three years old. Just as well, Evan thought. No parent should ever outlive their children; it’s unnatural. It was a strange thing to say, though, regarding Moon people. With rejuvenation tech, the meaning behind this ancient saying had been lost a long time ago, but it still felt meaningful to Evan. He thought he could see it in his father sometimes.

  He had spent less than a week here after his brother’s funeral, but since the age of six, he had spent three months every year at the Luna Academy for children. That was obligatory until he was twelve. But at his father’s insistence, he had kept going until the age of sixteen, which was normal for the more prominent families. That last year was the year when he had begun acting up and showing an attitude toward his instructors. He’d been glad to go back to Earth that year, and as the rebellious teen he was, he’d sworn he’d never return.

  He smiled at the memories, as the vehicle entered the gate of Nidaros. He’d changed a lot since then, he thought.

  Sue

  Sue was strapped tightly into her seat, waiting for the shuttle to take off. Around her sat Luna Brigade soldiers, Moon people all. Meridian Shukov sat next to her. He had helped her strap in, and though he behaved friendly enough, she suspected he was there mainly to make sure she didn’t make a run for it. Either way, it was too late for that now. Besides, she was excited about what was going to happen next, and since she had no control of the situation anyhow, she allowed herself to relax and look forward to it. She heard the engines roar, and she knew they were just about to take off.

  Unlike the airships and the scramjets, the shuttle was unable to take off vertically from Earth. They took off using its rocket to accelerate down a long runway to a high enough speed that it could lift off the ground. She felt every small bump in the runway as it accelerated. This was definitely nothing like flying an airship. And, unlike the speed and precision of the Scramjet takeoff, the shuttle felt like it was about to veer wildly at any moment, and she imagined it crashing and burning as it was tossed around like a toy thrown by an angry kid. Her fingers tore into her seat as she fought a stab of panic, all the while trying to appear as calm as the men and women around her. They looked like they had done this before, since most of them were either reading or chatting. Some were even dozing. She couldn’t imagine how that could be possible.

  She felt the tug of gravity pushing her back in her seat, and she found it difficult to breathe. She was terrified, and then, suddenly, the bumping and rolling stopped as the shuttle left the runway. She looked out the window and saw the ground disappear below her. After a few more minutes, the shuttle rolled. She looked out and saw how everything changed. It was the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen; a blue sphere against a silver-specked black sky. Earth, she realized. She let go of her seat
and flexed her fingers. Once she stopped tensing her muscles, she watched her hand float up from her lap and laughed softly. Gravity was gone. She was weightless. Meridian Shukov smiled at her when he saw her reaction.

  “Welcome to space, Miss Atlas,” he said.

  Dave

  Dave was absolutely certain he would die, and soon. He had crawled and hobbled his way since early morning, and now the night was falling quickly. He had no idea how far he had come or how long it had been since he had crossed the Belt. His shirt and pants were ripped to shreds, and his cuts were raw and irritated. He was soaked, and dirty, and he was shivering, although he wasn’t sure if it was because of the cold or because of the blood loss and probably infection setting in. He was surprised to find himself still relatively clear-headed, even though the blood loss was substantial. The thing that bothered him the most though, was his right leg. His blood-soaked foot ached in his boot, which he hadn’t dared take off. Better to have some protection than have his bloody foot covered in mud and dirt. He could feel some loose crunching in the toe of the boot, and he knew his toes were gone. He had stumbled, crawled, lost consciousness, awoken again, always moving toward the lights. And now he was here. Home, even though it didn’t feel like home right now.

  He crawled through a dark street on the outskirts of his hometown, keeping away from streetlights and people. Someone passing nearby looked vaguely familiar, but he was too tired to even try to think, to consider asking for help. He was exhausted.