by James Hunt
Sydney’s port officer was, luckily, an old friend of Lance’s. The two had served together in the Chinese uprising during the Island Wars, and while Lance had never thought twice about the Chinese again, it had become a bit of an obsession with Danny.
“Good to see you back here again,” Danny said, clapping Lance on the back.
Even the smells of the port couldn’t overpower Danny’s stench. Lance was convinced the man never showered, yet somehow he managed to keep dirt off of him. The one time Lance asked him about it, Danny simply shrugged and told him that powerful men emit powerful odors. “Looks like a busy morning.”
“Busy month.” Danny and Lance stepped aside as a group of men wheeled a cart past them filled with apricots. “I swear we’ll need to build another set of docks before the end of the year.”
Hundreds of boots thumped against the weather-worn planks as Lance and Danny headed toward the port office. “The Brazilians are charging a steep price for timber right now, although we might be able to help you out on a deal.”
“Just because you managed to strike up a new trade agreement with the South Americans doesn’t make you the expert on negotiations, Lance. It was your brother who accomplished that. Not you.”
A blast of hot, stale air greeted Lance’s face once they stepped inside the office. Danny opened a window and let the sea air try and cool the room, but it did little to help. “So, you brought six hundred pounds with you this time?” Danny flopped into his chair, reaching for the paperwork and a pen.
“Seven hundred. Along with three hundred bales of wheat.”
“Wheat?” Danny raised an eyebrow. “When did you start chancing on wheat?”
“Last harvest. With our new agreements with the wasteland clans, we haven’t had to worry about raiding in over a year. It was a risk, but it was one worth taking.”
Danny drummed the pen on the edge of his desk. “You Mars boys always trying to think three steps ahead of the rest of us. You picked a good time to do it.” He scribbled onto the trading documents. “You’ll get a good trade for that wheat, although I’m afraid I can’t say the same for the potatoes.”
“If all goes well, we’ll be able to bring more bales, and grains by this time next year should be tripled.” At least that was what Fred had told him.
“You keep this up, and you’ll be able to open up some credit with us, Lance.” Danny stamped the papers, approving his goods to be sold and traded. “That’s if the Chinese don’t try and kill us again.”
Lance grabbed the piece of parchment and shook his head. “They’d need ships and an army to do that, and you and I both know their sanctions haven’t been lifted. They don’t have the resources, Danny.”
Danny thrust a pudgy finger at the docks. “I’ve been seeing more and more of their merchants coming here. You know as well as I do that the Brazilians cozied up to the Chinese the moment they knew the war was won. Look”—Danny grabbed some of his old files—“for the past five years, they’ve had a steady seven percent increase in their beef trades each year. Why?”
“The same reason all of us do,” Lance answered. “Beef is valuable.”
“My point exactly! They could be trading with the Russians, the Africans, or whatever’s left of the deserts!”
“There isn’t anything left in the deserts. What world is left we’ve seen. Everything else is dust and ash.” With his paperwork signed and a lull in the argument, Lance took the opportunity to leave and go meet with the traders at the merchants’ market.
Traders from all over the world bustled back and forth under the makeshift canopies shading different goods and products. The air was thick with haggling as everyone bickered over prices, trying to get a leg up on their competitors.
Lance recognized a few of his regulars, some of them weathered slightly more than others but for the most part still in good shape. He passed Francis, who managed to give him a decent amount fruits for half his shipment of potatoes, and Constance, who he managed to bring down to sixty bushels of wheat for silk threads, but ran into trouble when he saw Benjamin, who was the lord of everything beef in the Australian market.
“Lance.” The voice was rough, accented with the Australian tongue to go along with it. “I’m a little disappointed to see those clansmen didn’t kill you.”
“They had a few chances but missed.” Lance shook Benjamin’s hand, which was almost twice the size of his.
“Good.” The giant clapped his bear paw on Lance’s shoulder and nearly crushed him to the ground. “I wouldn’t want some savage taking the honor away from me.” Benjamin flashed his yellow-stained teeth and with it the stench of whatever was left from his morning breakfast. “I suppose you’ll want some beef.”
The merchant traders had a hierarchy. Everyone knew who had what and how much of it they had, and with that, a status that was either valued or taken advantage of followed. When Lance first started, he was at the bottom, but now he’d worked his way up the ladder a few rungs. But Benjamin was still top dog. “I have wheat. Ninety bushels. And three hundred pounds of potatoes.”
“Wheat?” That word seemed to be catching everyone off guard today. With most of the grassland in the outback used for cattle, there wasn’t much for farming. Water was hard to come by, and what water they did have was funneled to their livestock. Despite the resources herding cattle consumed, the Aussies found it hard to let go of their crown jewel. “Looks like you’ve been doing more than playing war.”
By the end of the talks, Lance had managed to move every pound and bushel of goods on his ship. With the promise of increased deliveries of wheat in both quantity and frequency, Lance haggled out a fine deal with Benjamin. Before he made it back to the ship, he stopped at one of the smaller markets to buy lunch. He settled on a seafood stew that he caught a whiff of the moment he entered the square.
Lance paid the woman a silver piece, and when he turned, he caught the eye of a man watching him. He kept a casual pace through the market, taking bites and sips of the stew as he walked. The area was crowded and dense, and he lost the tail easily enough.
The man who’d followed him wore a hooded cloak, and Lance watched him curse in frustration. Theft and murder were more commonplace among the merchant tents than he cared for, but the fact that the tail trailing Lance looked Chinese piqued his interest.
Lance ditched his lunch and kept an eye on the back of the hood through the hundreds of people, both native and foreigners, in the heart of Sydney’s downtown. The worn dirt and cobbled streets had just as much garbage and waste as it did feet that pushed it around. He never enjoyed the large cities—they always stank of death, and he’d smelled enough of that in war.
The hooded man passed some street peddlers performing tricks and then disappeared down an alleyway, away from the main crowds.
Lance poked his head down the alley and watched the man enter a building on the other side. He decided to circle around to the next street crossing and see if there was another way in, one giving him the high ground. He found a narrow staircase that led up the side of the building adjacent to where the hooded figure had entered, and Lance hurried up the steps.
The roofs of the two buildings were close enough for Lance to make the jump across the narrow alleyway below. He kept his feet light across the rooftop, looking for a way inside, which he found through a shattered window near the rafters. He squeezed his way inside the tight opening and lowered himself onto the old wooden beams that lined the ceiling. He teetered across the platforms, following the faint sound of voices.
The high ceiling caused the words to echo and distort before making it to Lance’s ears. He descended the tangled wooden beams that crisscrossed along the ceiling like a jungle gym, twisting his body to accommodate the tight spaces that he squeezed through.
“It’s all there,” one voice said. “Now, it is your turn to provide the payment.”
The lower Lance moved, the more he could make out what was happening below. Six men formed a half circle around the hooded fi
gure that he tailed, and next to them were crates stuffed with hay.
“I’ll still need to see it before payment,” the hooded figure replied.
One of the six men cracked open the closest crate, and Lance nearly fell from the rafters when the man pulled out an advanced rifle, like the ones used before the Great War, in nearly perfect condition.
“AK-47,” the dealer said. “Complete with ammunition.”
Lance and his brothers had stockpiled as many of the old weapons as they could, saving them for times of war. But with the lack of ammunition to reload them, most battles now were fought with the powder-and-lead weapons made by their blacksmiths. And if all of the stacked crates were filled with those AK-47s, whoever wielded it would have a significant advantage in warfare.
The hooded figure nodded then tucked the automatic rifle back into the cargo hold with the others. From the count of boxes, it looked like there were at least five hundred guns.
“You held up your end of the bargain,” the hooded figured answered. “Now, I’ll hold up mine.” Lance descended lower, getting a closer look at their faces. Smugglers and pirates were known to provide backdoor services for the Chinese to skirt around sanctions, and a deal of this magnitude would land some serious gold.
While he knew the buyer was Chinese, Lance couldn’t place the accent of the sellers, but he did notice a patch on their arms: a sickle surrounded with four stars in a half circle.
“Well?” one of the sellers asked. “Where is he?”
“Right above us.” The hooded figure pulled his pistol and fired into the rafters. The bullet ricocheted against the beams, and before Lance could reach for his weapon, the sellers joined in the gunfight.
Lance tucked himself behind the widest beam he could find, but with the modern weapons being fired below, the wooden pillar soon turned to swiss cheese. Lance fired down into the hostile crowd below then dashed across the beams, splinters of wood flying behind him from the storm of bullets, to a balcony that wrapped around the third story of the massive warehouse.
The gunfire ended once Lance made it to the balcony, where he was still two stories above his attackers. The balcony offered no ladder or other way down, so he backtracked, looking up to the open window from which he entered, trying to find a way up that wouldn’t expose him, but the beams were too thin.
Lance sprinted around to the rear of the building on the third floor. He found a door at the far end that was locked. He reloaded his pistol, shot the door handle off, and slammed the heel of his boot into the wood, forcing his way in.
A breath of relief escaped Lance as he saw sunlight filter through a dirty window. He picked up a chair inside the room then chucked it through the glass on his sprint. The chair crashed through the window then shattered on the ground.
Lance poked his head outside and saw a pipe that ran from the roof to the alley below within arm’s reach of the window. When he shifted all of his weight to the pipe, a few of the brackets pulled themselves from the concrete wall, jolting him out into the alleyway, but he managed to keep his footing.
The moment Lance’s feet hit the pavement, he sprinted down the alleyway just as the gun dealers made their way to the window, opening fire and redecorating the alleyway’s corner as Lance sprinted out of sight.
A cramp tightened Lance’s hamstring just before he made it back to the crowded safety of the market, and he had to slow his pace. He continued to check behind him, trying to figure out if they would be stupid enough to follow. He didn’t believe they would. With the amount of guns they had packed in that building, they’d hang in the square for their crimes.
The only question was who they were. While Lance knew the buyer who shot at him looked Chinese, he had no idea who the sellers were, but the patch the gunrunners wore looked oddly familiar, like a relic from a past long thought dead.
***
The town hall was filled to the brim. Even with the extra seating, people still stood along the walls as villagers, farmers, merchants, and anyone and everyone that could be affected by another attack by the clans piled into the near-bursting hall. The voices and murmurs grew with every person that entered, along with the hot stink of rage.
Dean Mars watched the scene through a crack in the curtains behind the stage. He knew what they all wanted and what they all believed happened. But all of their wants and beliefs would contradict what Dean would tell them.
Dean had spent the past three hours with his nephews, talking to each of them separately then together. He made them tell him the story over and over, making sure that he knew every angle, every possible detail. With the stakes this high, he needed to make sure that it was the right call. He looked down at his clinched fist, a silver chain dangling from between his fingers. Fred’s bloody pendulum rested inside. Dean looked down to his own neck where an exact replica of the silver sphere that his eldest brother wore also dangled from his neck.
“Uncle Dean, I promise you, that’s what I saw,” Kit said.
Dean looked over the sketching of the symbol a few more times. It wasn’t anything he remembered his father or brothers talking about when he was younger, nor was it the sign any of the wasteland clans wore. However, an itch in the recesses of his mind lingered that he just couldn’t scratch. He’d called for the historian, but he was still a day’s ride away, and the growing mob in the town hall wouldn’t wait that long. If he didn’t address this issue now, then he’d risk the districts taking matters into their own hands, and another war with the clans was the last thing his region needed.
The two boys had come to him in the middle of the night, smudged in dirt, soot, blood, and with the stench of fear on them. Sam hadn’t said a word, regardless of how much Dean tried to coax a whisper out of him. He kept close to Kit, who had bloodlust in his eyes and echoed the same cries for vengeance that the mob outside demanded.
Kit stood there, a granite expression of rage carved on his face, clenching his fists together, his body taut and rigid—he looked just as Dean had remembered Fred did when they were on the battlefield. Dean had never seen a commander like his eldest brother and would never see the likes of again. But with the same eyes as his father, Kit seemed determined to test that belief.
“Kit, I don’t want you and Sam here for the meeting,” Dean said, placing his hand on Kit’s shoulder. “You and your brother will wait back at my quarters. You need to rest.”
Kit shrugged Dean’s hand off and took a step back. “No, you can’t do that. They were my parents. I have more of a right to be here than anyone, and you know that!” Despite a man’s rage, the boy still had the pale look of a frightened boy.
“Your duty is with your brother now,” Dean replied, his words harsher than before. “Now, would you have me speak to you as your uncle, or regional governor? Because I am willing to do either, but it would be wiser for you to heed my words as your uncle.”
Kit lowered his head then sulked over to Sam and scooped his younger brother up in his arms. The boy’s hurting, but he’ll understand these types of decisions when he’s older. Dean instructed his own guards to escort Kit and Sam back to his house and keep an eye on them to ensure that’s where they stayed.
Dean’s advisors had given him what counsel they could with the situation at hand. It was a split decision on whether or not some declaration of war should be provided, but if that were the case, he’d need to speak with Jason. The blood from the last war had barely been scrubbed from their hands. Dean was not willing to throw peace away so hastily.
A short, portly man stepped from the front of the curtain, the crowd reaching a fever pitch behind him. “Governor, it’s time.”
Dean nodded, and his hand found the pendulum hidden under his shirt. When he stepped through the curtains, the clamoring ceased as everyone who was seated stood at attention. Dean gripped the edges of the podium harder than he’d meant to but quickly loosened his fingers and gestured for everyone to sit. “I know all of you are concerned. I’ve spent the past several hours g
oing over the details of what happened and have spoken to both my advisors as well as the district leaders to ensure I have all of the facts in place.”
“It was the clans, Governor! They need to be killed once and for all!” The man jumped from his seat and punched his fist into the air. Angry spittle dribbled onto his beard, and a wave of nods and agreements rolled over the rest of the crowd.
“We have fought with the clans for many years, and our final victory over them sealed their fate.” The room hushed at Dean’s words. While tempers were high, his people gave him the respect that they knew he deserved. “Our agreement with the clans is still in place, and until we have a formal declaration of any type of war, I will be treating this as a death crime.”
Another spasm of disagreement erupted, and Dean smacked the gavel on his podium as sporadic shouts filled the hall. “The evidence we have suggests behaviors of thieves, not clansmen. They wore masks and rode at night. I fought the clans for many years, and so did Fred. There is no one in this room that wants justice for my brother more than me, but we cannot let fear guide our decisions.” The room hushed, and a few of the more boisterous citizens flushed red and downcast their eyes in embarrassment. “I will lead an emissary to speak with the clan members personally, and mark my word, I will find out if they had anything to do with this. Until my return, district leader Mulville will be in charge. Thank you.”
The smack of Dean’s gavel ended the address, and he stepped outside to meet with some of the news writers personally. All of them had pen and paper out, jotting down whatever notes they could. “Gentlemen, I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep a cool head with whatever narrative you spin.”
“Governor, we’re not here to start war whispers, we just want the facts.”
Dean could have given them enough content to fill an entire paper, but in the end, he stuck with the cliffs notes. “I don’t want any citizens seeking out their own form of retaliation. Any who ignore our laws will be punished to the full extent. We’ve spent enough time in the dark ages. There isn’t any need to go back. Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to send word to my brothers.”