Ashes of Freedom

by K. J. Coble

  C’mon, Cynn...please, tell me that monster didn’t...didn’t detain you...please tell me you’re not still in that—

  A flurry of motion downstairs sent her and the others lunging for weapons. Then voices, one of them a woman’s...Cynthia’s. Moments later, Sten led Cynthia into the room. She was uneven on her feet, her cheeks tear-stained, her eyes not quite focused.

  “Cynn, are you...what happened?”

  “I’m fine,” Cynthia replied, seeming to gather herself and forcing Sten’s supportive hands away. “But we’ve got to get out of here. They’re on to us. They’ve got to be!”

  “I don’t understand, Cynn, what—”

  “No time for that!” Sten growled. The other partisans were on their feet, already loading up and ready to flee. “Blow it.”

  “Right.” Sandy turned and grabbed the detonator pad.

  “No, Sandy...” Cynthia grabbed at Sandy’s shoulders. “No, we have to go. Forget the bomb! Forget it! Let’s go!”

  Sandy shook her sister off and looked at her. Cynthia’s red eyes spilled fresh tears and she was tearing at her hair. What did those bastards do to her?

  “Sandy, please...let’s go...”

  Sandy looked at Sten, felt herself harden. “Get her out of here.”

  She turned back to the window with the detonator pad in her hand, her chest a white-hot core of rage. Behind her, Cynthia tried to wail, but it came out a moan. Sten tried to sound consoling as he and the others dragged her from the room.

  And left Sandy alone, calm settling through her, hatred bringing deadly clarity. She looked through the binoculars a last time, keyed the computer’s timer, and set the bomb Cynthia had left under an upstairs bed to blow.

  The team was waiting for her in an alley beside the hotel. Sten watched the street in front and the teenager stood sentinel at the back, the escape route. Sten asked, “How long?”

  “Not very,” she answered, her voice made brittle by stress and anger. “Enough time to get back to the safe house.” She went to Cynthia, now wrapped in a ragged shawl that formed a hood over her head. Sandy took her twin by the arm and looked at Sten. “I’ve got her. Let’s go.”

  Sten nodded and led the way into the web of back alleys. This part of Forlorn was largely abandoned, its population having degraded drastically under Invader rule. Buildings were decayed ruin and their few inhabitants were creatures who feared sunlight almost as much as the Invaders. The air was hot and abrasive with dust and despair.

  “Oh, Sandy...”

  “Shh, not now, sweetie,” Sandy said, leaning into her sister’s huddled form. She glanced at the detonator pad, now strapped to her arm. The ten minutes she had given them eroded like sand before surf. The safe house was three blocks, made longer by the fact that they had to hug the alleys and not take a direct route. She patted Cynthia’s back. “You did wonderful, Cynn. You were so brave.”

  “...the others...they’re still in there...”

  “Don’t think about that, now.” Sandy hadn’t thought about the whores, didn’t care what happened to a pack of Collaborator sluts. But her sister would have formed some sort of rapport with the brothel’s denizens over the months of intelligence gathering. Sandy thought about the poor bastard barkeep, left on display like raw meat, and felt a pang of sorrow.

  The partisans crossed a garbage-strewn back yard, ducked through a holed fence and were at the safe house. A short, skinny man with greasy black hair, buckteeth and silvery sunglasses waved them into the back door with a machine pistol. A pair of stocky men in black leathers played cards on an overturned fuel drum as if nothing out of the ordinary transpired. One wore sunglasses the practiced eye would recognize as a sensor visor.

  Sandy was nearly to the door when the explosion crashed through Forlorn. She stumbled, tripping in the tangle of her twin’s feet and going down. She landed hard, skinning her palms on the cracked dirt of the yard. The safe house owner was at her side to help her up in a moment.

  The roar of the blast was all around them. Sandy heard shattering glass as every window within blocks blew in. She let the safe house man pull her up and turned to see the fruits of her labor.

  A column of fire roiled skyward, distending into a perverse shape as the superheated gases propelling it expanded. The wind felt hot and sharp against the skin of her face as she grinned. The men in the yard continued their game. Beside her, the safe house owner began to laugh the thin cackle of one unaccustomed to victory.

  Cynthia whimpered.

  THE COLLABORATOR COLUMN entered the street with an armored car in the lead. It was a half-track model with passable sloped armor up front over the engine and driver, dense plates along the rear where a Militia squad would ride. Defense Force light infantry vehicle, cheap and locally manufactured with rural application in mind, chiefly policing Lurinari’s vast wildernesses.

  The engine sounded terrible and it looked poorly kept up, like most Collaborator gear—the Korvans weren’t interested in arming their lackeys for anything more robust than domestic squabbles.

  Two unarmored hovercars in the dusty gray of Collaborator police followed, then a hovertruck with a covered back, then a third police cruiser.

  Vorsh sighted on the armored car, on the gunner leaned back in the open turret aft of the driver’s compartment, behind a coaxial machinegun, smoking a cigarette. The targeting dot steadied on the Collaborator and Vorsh felt himself tighten as he realized the gunner was a Shmali. He heard Worthy’s words—something dirty about killing your own kind—and couldn’t decide if the cool knot in his belly was dread or excitement.

  “Shit,” Worthy hissed beside Vorsh. The human listened for a second to his headset, then leaned close to him, whispering. “The others, the armored car, the cruiser, and the other truck split off. They’re coming down the street behind us.”

  “Fine,” Vorsh replied with his sight still on the Collaborator Shmali. His hands felt cold on his blastrifle and the icy tingle spread across his body like sweat. “One thing at a time.”

  “But the—”

  “They’re almost to the spot, Worthy. Get fucking set.”

  Whatever words the human had begun lodged audibly in his throat. Below, the armored car had nearly reached the gutted chassis crumpled against the curb. The Shmali gunner blew out a stream of smoke and leaned forward in his turret. A sagging gray cap shaded his eyes but he seemed to be staring straight up at Vorsh.

  “Now.”

  The twenty-kilo pack of high explosive planted in the rusting car body went up with an orange-red thunderclap. The rooftop rippled beneath Vorsh, flopping him dangerously close to the edge as shingles jolted free and fluttered down into the street.

  Across the way, the front of the building the car had once graced slid into ruin with a crash that sent dust and debris swirling skyward with the fireball. For a moment, as he reoriented himself, Vorsh could see nothing in the stinging haze.

  Worthy didn’t give the Collaborators time to recover. Touching the lights across his wrist pad, he set every garbage can, beer bottle or trash bag along the avenue to exploding in blossoms of hellfire and tendrils of white-phosphorous glare. The roar of the incendiaries nearly drowned out the scream of the rocket teams opening up. Their missiles drew brief trails of sparks, clawing the street in a fiery web.

  Then it seemed to be over. The voices of the other partisans, the sounds of weapons being hurriedly reloaded were faint, ringing in Vorsh’s ears. Worthy murmured something. Vorsh blinked his eyes, felt unreal for a moment, unable to recall what he had been doing. Realization came to him in a rush. He steadied his rifle and sighted down along the street.

  The kill zone was sooty black and flickering flame. Vehicles lay in twisted metal tatters, pouring smoke. Charred piles were bodies, strewn around the wrecks, at the curbs, along the sidewalks. Some still moved, squirmed as blue-gray tendrils steamed off them. Vorsh’s ears rang too much to hear their misery. He grinned with the thrill of such sudden, massive carnage.

&nbs
p; The armored car had been too heavy for the first blast to knock over—the goal had been more to stun, immobilize. The swarm of missiles had finished it, punching through armor, gutting the engine, the fighting compartment. Smoke swirled up through the turret, flames giving a feeble glitter. Nothing moved. Nothing could be alive down there. An odd part of Vorsh felt relieved.

  A sudden crackle of small arms fire followed by shouts came from behind and below. Vorsh turned to Worthy.

  “The other column.”

  Worthy nodded and shouted to the missile teams, “The other side! Quick!”

  The partisans rose from their perches and scrambled across the rooftop, hauling the heavy weapons and clips of reloads. Another burst of fire sounded below, sounding different than the first. Vorsh stopped himself, grabbing Worthy.

  “What the—what are you doing?” Worthy’s arm was slick and trembling beneath Vorsh’s fingers.

  “They’re in the building,” Vorsh said, straining to hear. He shook himself, knew he was wasting time, and headed for the stairwell. He didn’t bother to check if the human followed.

  Footsteps below coupled with muffled shouts. The shouts became screams and confusion as the dull thunder of the rocket teams shuddered through the building. Vorsh grinned as he flew down the steps two at a time, Cole’s clumsy rumble at his back.

  The noise grew as they descended, swelling until it was all around. There were at least a dozen Collaborators in the building, split into pairs or threes. Testing bursts of gunfire shook through thin walls, but the noise began to lessen as the fools calmed themselves, began to actually coordinate.

  Vorsh curbed his downward charge, slowing his gait until he was padding along in near silence. Worthy’s gasping breaths and human sweat-stink behind him was almost enough to overwhelm. They reached a turn in the stairwell. Light leaked down through the shattered remnants of a glass dome, but Vorsh could see even better with his visor’s amplification. And his other senses were at their sharpest. He held up a hand and brought the heaving Worthy to a halt.

  “They...got us surrounded...” Worthy’s voice was nearly a sob.

  “Quiet.” Sounds below. A flurry of poorly muffled footsteps, the gentle clank of gear, a hiss, a whisper, the click of a safety coming off.

  “We can’t get out.”

  “We’re getting out the way we came in,” Vorsh replied. They were down there. Close. Vorsh shivered with building frenzy.

  “We ca—”

  The motion of turning and clamping his free hand over Worthy’s windpipe happened almost before Vorsh realized he’d done it. The human’s eyes bulged with surprise. Vorsh tightened the grip, leaning close until the human’s nose nearly touched his face.

  The temptation to keep squeezing was a surprise.

  “It’s like before, Cole,” Vorsh said, barely audible. “I’ll leave you. It makes no difference to me.”

  An eruption of noise below, feet racing upstairs. Vorsh released Worthy, spun with his blastrifle, and leapt down the last four steps. He whirled around the corner.

  A Collaborator stood within a meter of Vorsh. The blocky peasantish face looked up with mouth open as the militiaman fumbled with the assault rifle a professional or a Korvan would already have had aimed. Vorsh touched the trigger pad. The white fire had barely a hand’s breadth to leap from the muzzle to the Collaborator’s chest.

  The militiaman dropped to the steps with a fist-sized hole through his torso. Vorsh crouched, firing over him into the pair of Collaborators coming up behind. One staggered, clutching in surprise at the charred stump where the hand holding his rifle had been. The other spun down the stairs, the top of his head burned away.

  Vorsh vaulted the dead leader, hit the stairs below, and nearly slipped on voided bowel. The wounded Collaborator had fallen in a sitting position, shouting something as his remaining hand fumbled for a holstered pistol. Vorsh put a bolt into his chest as he hurtled by, the deafening shriek swallowing the fool’s scream. Vorsh stepped on the hand of the last body and clearly felt the pop of fingers breaking.

  Commotion exploded above and behind as the other Collaborators scrambled toward the disturbance. Vorsh was on the move now, speed and rage pulsing through his nerves. The stairs sped by. The exit lay below, ahead, sunlight shining through. The door flew aside.

  In the street beyond, vehicles burned. Rockets screamed and the ground shook as concrete shattered. Vorsh turned left, away from the killing ground where holdout fire had surviving Collaborators pinned against the wall. A human barred his route, some sort of militia officer by the markings. The man shouted something, an order, then realized what was before him.

  Vorsh shot the officer in the belly. A man behind him turned in surprise, then flew away in blaster fire. Vorsh kept going, the strain beginning to tell, howling in his joints, in his chest, where breathing tore him with heaving motions. He ducked into an alley, heard the battle sounds beginning to lessen. He felt a presence behind him, realized it was Worthy, and couldn’t decide is he was glad.

  “What about the others?” Worthy rasped as he tried to match his loping strides to Vorsh’s smooth prowl.

  Vorsh glanced over his shoulder at the street behind them. No immediate pursuit. They only needed a few minutes to disappear into these ramshackle surroundings. The din of the firefight rose in sudden, snarling fury that seemed to come from above, from the rooftops. A lone blastrifle keened in reply until it was swallowed in a final, drawn-out flurry.

  Vorsh looked to the alley ahead of them, clenching the cool alloy of his weapon close. He kept going, didn’t answer his companion’s question.

  A FIST OF ANTI-MATTER fire slugged through the single, overworked train engine, a hammer-blow of sound and white light and warped metal spraying across the summer landscape. Rooster-tails of sparks from desperately braking wheels lit flaming jets of diesel that poured across the railroad cut, spilling into the surrounding woods with an ongoing whoompf.

  The train screamed, the following cars jouncing over the crater left by the mine and coming loose, splintering, folding, crumpling into each other. Crozier bit his tongue, tasted blood as the wailing went on, piercing down along his spine, numbing his skull. Wheels flew free, deadly metal frisbees punching through full-grown trees. Metal piled up and kept coming, twisting over itself as it ground closer to the partisans’ perch like a snake writhing in a blaze.

  “Hold fire,” Crozier grated into his helm mike. He could feel his tongue swelling already.

  An unhinged boxcar was coming right at him, gouging earth in a wavefront before it as momentum carried it up along the rise. Crozier sucked in his breath, felt a cold clamp on his heart and wondered at the insanity of dying this way, of all others available in this crazy war. But the forward motion was not enough and the car began to tumble, crashing back down across the tracks as the last of the wreck’s kinetic energy bled out.

  Stillness followed, and a quiet that could not be natural.

  Crozier shook himself as he looked across the monstrous, coiled mess that steamed like a metal dragon finally slain. His head rang. Over that came new sounds: moaning, whimpers, a shrill scream.

  A plasma blast snarled from the wreckage. Wriggling, armored forms began emerging from the train’s corpse. Another blast chopped a bough from the tree beside Crozier. He watched the smoldering limb fall in dazed fascination.

  “Let them have it!” Ro shouted over the tactical network.

  The rise along the track erupted with partisan gunfire and smoky arches of missile tracks that terminated in blossoms of flame. Planks of wood siding from the boxcars flew apart in splinters, ricocheting bullets wailed off rusted metal undercarriages and whickered amongst Korvans struggling to get into the fight. Cars caught fire and began to swirl into building infernos. The sounds of misery grew more pronounced.

  Crozier watched a Korvan pull what was left of its leg out of a crushed car, firing its plasma rifle with one hand. Ro, howling something, raked the train from one end to the other. O
ne of his bursts pulsed through the Korvan’s skull just before it reached cover.

  What are you doing? Part of Crozier demanded. He was stunned. The spectacle was like nothing he’d encountered in the war, the Korvans helpless, flailing, being butchered. It was horrible. It was beautiful.

  A boxcar door was being forced open from within below him. Crozier regrouped his wits and took aim at the shuddering door. The car was being rapidly consumed by flames, was hard to see in the smoke and rippling heat. A firing dot drew itself across Crozier’s visor. He held his shot, wanted them out in the open.

  The door sprung open and a swirling, tattered mass of humanity spilled forth. A hail of fire, bullet, and blaster bolt chopped into the tide of flesh with scarlet abandon. The screams and pleas and wails were unmistakable for what they were now. But the fire kept pouring in.

  Oh, my God. Crozier froze in an awful, unending moment. The chill was replaced by barreling nausea, a need to curl up and howl and pretend it wasn’t happening, could not be.

  It was not an early train; it was the wrong train. Its cargo was not armaments or food stocks; it was boxcars crammed full of flesh, people, helpless folk due for the camps, the Korvan slave-machine, due to be harvested.

  “Oh, God, cease fi—”

  Something slammed into his faced, cut off his words. The massacre dulled around him. He shook himself, realized his face was in the dirt. His head felt heavy, the helmet dragging him down as he tried to lift it. He tasted blood.

  “Pour it on!” Ro screamed over the radio.

  Crozier’s vision steadied and he looked at the Grak. His fangs locked and black eyes flashed in the glare blasts jolting from his rifle. There were smudges of red on the knuckles of his left hand.

  He had punched Crozier to silence him.

  Below, a young man in the frayed remains of a suit was dragging a fellow prisoner from the blazing boxcar. A blaster bolt caught him between the shoulder blades, flopped him forward over his friend. Meters away, an unhurt Korvan struggled through the mass of panic to take aim with his plasma rifle. A flurry of gunfire cut him down but dropped the girls to either side of him, as well. At the edge of the railroad cut, a woman carried a bloodied child towards the sparse foliage beyond with her faced locked in mindless determination.