“We’ll stay here and give them instructions. Because they must cross the shaft quickly, and carefully. If anybody falls, there’s no chance of rescue. Got that?”
“Okay. We’ll work together and get them across.”
Athena seemed to be the female counterpart of Mott. She was clearheaded, purposeful—in complete control of her emotions.
“I’m Mott, by the way.” He held out his hand.
Solemnly, she shook it. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Have we met before?”
She nodded. “But this isn’t the time to reminisce.”
He nodded, too. “How many of you are there?”
“Two hundred and eighty-one.”
“Shit!” Grunt howled. “Two eighty-one! You’ll never get them across there.”
“We have to.” She spoke with calm authority. “Flukes broke into this part of the complex three days ago. Our population then stood at three hundred and thirty. We’re being harvested, Mott.”
“Okay,” Mott announced. “We’re taking the girls back to Bastion. Let’s get them out of there.” He turned to me. “Do whatever you can to keep the lizard out of our way.”
I took a firm grip on the lance. After that, I used the loops to cross over to the other side of the pit.
Skitter. The creature was now perhaps thirty feet from the top. The muscular power of those claws. They dug so fiercely into the concrete that parts of the wall shattered, shooting out jets of dust. The silver eyes fixed on me. There was clear intent there. I would be its first victim.
As I hunkered down to keep a watch on the Gator-Raptor, the population of Girl Farm started to make the hazardous journey. The first one crossed. She put one foot in the stirrup loop, then she gripped the vine on the uppermost pipe, as directed by Mott, and then moved to the next loop and so on until she’d reached the other side.
“One safely across,” I murmured. “Two hundred and eighty to go.”
The girls were aged eleven through to sixteen. The same kind of age range as the boy soldiers in Bastion. That can hardly be a coincidence, I told myself. In Bastion we took care of the Factory Floor. We kept the machines working. Here they tend the fields. I crouched even lower so I could look through where the window had been. What I’d first taken to be a bright sky was, in fact, a white roof. A glowing mist floated beneath roof beams. So the farmland was inside, too, just like the Factory Floor. I imagined there’d be residential quarters for the girls, which would be similar to the boys’ rooms at Bastion. No doubt there’d be a shaft that led up to a hatchway. Beyond that hatch would be disused mine workings.
Bastion lay deep underground. The farm did, too. We were subterranean. We were cave dwellers.
Skitter.
I looked down into the human eyes of the Gator-Raptor and knew that the world I now lived in was radically different to the one I’d previously known.
Skitter.
When the creature opened its mouth to roar at me I fired the Nitro Lance into its mouth. The blast of sub-zero gas froze its blue tongue. Teeth shattered due to thermal shock. The creature convulsed with pain. I watched as it fell through the air, spinning around and around, tail and snout clipping the insides of the wall. The splash it made in the yellow river was a huge one.
Within moments, a second creature began to climb.
The girls continued moving across. One foot in the first loop, then second foot in the same loop, then one foot in the next loop…hands grabbing hold of successive vine rings, and then repeat the process.
Through the shattered window I could see the line of girls. Athena told them what to do. Quietly, she encouraged them to move with care and efficiency. She didn’t want to panic them. Out there in the cornfields, white twists of fog were rotating. The Flukes were homing in on their victims. Mott made his way outside. He picked a position between the girls and the Flukes—the lone warrior standing guard.
A sudden scream.
One of the girls had slipped. I caught a glimpse of a falling figure. Egg-Yolk River splashed. The faller vanished. There was a sudden churning in the liquid. Briefly the yellow plasma turned red.
Athena calmed the screaming girls. She ordered them to continue making the crossing. When they reached my side of the pit they looked so relieved. Some even began to smile.
They really did believe they were safe. Of course, they didn’t know they still had to cross the battlefield that was the Factory Floor.
From Bastion Wars:
What happened next showed how extraordinary human beings can be. Their will to survive is incredible. Be proud of the young people of Bastion. Be proud that they were warriors.
* * *
—
Two hundred and eighty females. And three males. That was the number that made it safely across the pit, using the loops of viper ivy. Just one individual had fallen into the jaws waiting in the yellow river.
After the crossing we headed along the gloomy tunnel until we reached the exit that led through the huge engine and out onto the Factory Floor. Mott held up his hand; a signal to stop.
Athena approached him. “What’s the holdup?”
“We have to wait for the firing to stop,” he told her. “The fort is being attacked by Flukes. Bastion will be in lockdown until the Flukes quit.”
Grunt added bluntly, “We’ll be killed if we go out there now.”
So we settled down to wait. Mott ordered Grunt to make his way back through the crowded tunnel to guard the rear. Just in case the Gator-Raptors had decided to follow. Also, there was a chance that those Flukes that had been attacking the Girl Farm might find their way here, too.
This waiting presented an ideal opportunity. I started asking questions.
“Athena. That place where you lived, what was it called?”
“We just knew it as the Farm.”
“It’s underground?”
She gave a solemn nod. “We’re deep underground. Just like Bastion.”
“You’ve heard of Bastion, then?”
“Of course.”
Mott grinned. “You’ll get used to John, here. He’s always asking questions.”
“Sign of an active mind,” she said. “I take it, Mott, that you stopped asking questions a long time ago?”
His freckled face turned red. “We’re busy fighting a war, Miss.” His voice turned cold. “There’s no time for questions about matters that don’t concern us.”
“You grew crops.” My skin tingled as I spoke. I sensed my questions were going to produce astonishing answers. “All that food wasn’t for your people, was it?”
Athena gave me a long look. She was assessing me and no doubt realizing I was one of those bloodhound kinds of people who doggedly hunt down the truth. “No,” she said after a pause. “And I’m telling myself you’ve already figured out where the food was sent.”
“To Bastion? To us?”
“We’ve been supplying you with food for years,” she said. “We knew you were fighting the Flukes. You were preventing them from reaching us at the Farm.”
“No.” Mott appeared puzzled. “We stopped the Flukes from invading Bastion.”
“That’s what you thought you were doing.”
I said, “For some reason the people at Bastion don’t remember what’s happened to them in the past.”
“Don’t start that again, Soldier.” Mott was annoyed with me. “My memory’s fine.”
Athena spoke softly, “You don’t remember me, though, do you, Mott?”
“No. Should I?”
“We were friends once.”
He stared at her; his eyes turned hard with the effort of trying to remember her face. “I…I…” He gave a savage shake of his head as the memory eluded him. “Then i
t can’t be important. We must have met each other maybe once. In passing…you know? We weren’t friends, though. I don’t remember you.”
The words hurt Athena. For a moment, she turned her face away. I saw tears shine in her eyes. Her soft mouth gave little twitches. Like words pressed hard from the other side, yet she was determined not to let them out, as if afraid of appearing weak, or stupid, or sentimental.
Or in love.
Athena wasn’t the kind of girl to crumble. She had a backbone of steel. I could see that. She took a deep breath, then turned smartly on Mott.
“You should know some facts about us. My memory works perfectly well. Two hundred and eighty-one girls at the Farm grew crops, farmed poultry, looked after pigs, kept five hundred head of cattle. Girls aren’t weak, they aren’t squeamish. We understand the bloody realities of life. We’re not afraid to get our hands dirty.”
“I never accused you of weakness.” Mott turned sulky. “I never did. You’re survivors, like us.”
Athena spoke briskly. “We raised animals, we slaughtered them for food. We sealed the processed food into containers, which were dispatched through a system of pneumatic tubes to Bastion. You were fighting the Flukes. That meant you prevented them from entering our part of the complex. Wait. Let me finish.” She held up a finger as Mott tried to interrupt. “We gave you the best of our food. The choicest cuts of meat. We didn’t go hungry, but our food rations weren’t as generous as yours. Those machines that you keep running out on the Factory Floor provide us with electricity, recycled water, purified air, and other essentials that allow us to live and to maintain the environment of the farm, which in turn permits the growth of crops.”
“Then something happened, didn’t it?” I asked. “Flukes got into the Farm.”
“Yes, John, you’re right.” Her expression turned sad. “For a long time your people kept the Flukes out. Recently, all that changed. Somehow they found a way into our sector.”
“We still fought them,” Mott protested. “We didn’t let them through.”
“I’m not accusing you of failing us. I’m sure your boys kept fighting. Only there must have been some breach…Either a barrier gave way, or the Flukes discovered a secret tunnel, or something.” She sighed as she recalled past tragedies. “In any event, Flukes got into the farmlands. Unlike Bastion, we don’t have weapons to kill them. We were safe in the accommodation blocks, but if we stayed locked in there we couldn’t work the fields…that would mean we couldn’t feed you.”
Mott’s eyes opened wide. “You mean you went back into the fields when there were Flukes about? You risked your necks in order to send us the food?”
“What else could we do?” She held his gaze. “We wouldn’t let you starve.”
For a while there was silence. Two hundred and eighty-three people were crammed into that section of tunnel. Nobody talked. From the way the girls stared down at the floor I knew they were remembering the friends that they had lost. At least, they could remember. For reasons that were still mysterious to me, Mott and his soldiers suffered from a specific form of amnesia. When their friends died, they were soon forgotten. None of them could recall their family, schools, and friends from their past lives.
There was a reason for this: I figured out that endemic forgetfulness might be useful in an isolated community that was permanently under siege. Once again, questions filled my head as tightly as those people filled the tunnel.
My questions were a damn sight more impatient. They wanted out!
“Athena,” I asked, “what are Flukes?”
Mott answered instead with a terse: “They’re the enemy.”
“They are,” she agreed. “What a Fluke is, where it comes from, what its aims are I don’t know.” A smile tugged at her lips. “That’s something Mott and I can agree on. Flukes are the enemy. They want to kill us. That’s all we know about them.”
I took a deep breath. “I’ve other important questions that need to be answered…I mean, how did we arrive here? Why are we here?”
“No,” Athena said. “There’s only one question that has to be truly answered, and it’s this: How do we get home?”
From where I stood, I could see the expressions on a dozen or more girls. They’d listened to the conversation. When they heard Athena’s question: How do we get home? the expressions became even more serious. Each one nodded. Home. That’s where they wanted to go. Home. Their eyes were so solemn that I shivered. I wanted to help them. Human beings shouldn’t have to suffer like this.
For Mott there was a difference. He and his juvie army didn’t remember the past. At least not completely. They’d only grieve for a few hours over a dead comrade. Then memory of the deceased quietly slipped their minds. In Greek mythology, the river that the dead drink from before they pass over into the underworld gently erases knowledge of the past. The Lethe’s waters of forgetfulness usher in peace. The souls of the dead remember nothing of their mortal lives. So they don’t worry about the family they’ve left behind.
Something like this happened with the sixteen-year-old Mott and his comrades. He and his brothers in arms only lived for the present. They enjoyed their big roast chicken suppers, they played games of Takk Ball in the cupolas. There was plenty of fun to be had, watching monster movies with their pals or simply laughing and joking the way boys do. That band of brothers was a family. They loved their uniforms. Their battles with the Flukes excited them.
They were fulfilled. They didn’t want to go home…that would mean returning to a place that none of them remembered. Worse, they’d no longer be proud warriors.
Mott appeared to be thinking about the conversation. He knew it was an important one. What’s more, life at Bastion must change now. There would be boys there—and there would be girls. All living in the same complex. That meant a transformation in the lives of the Bastion Boys.
Maybe every so often in the human race there are times like this. When we suddenly realize that the old way of life has ended. That we will be forced to adopt a new mode of living. Change can be difficult. Even as a twelve-year-old I understood that. What’s more, change can be frightening.
Mott ran his fingers through that thick red hair of his. He’d decided to ask a difficult question of his own. “Athena?”
“Yes?”
“You say we knew each other?”
“We were friends.”
“Why did we stop being friends?”
“We never did stop.”
“Oh.”
“The reason we couldn’t see each other anymore is that the boys were sent away from the Farm to man the guns at Bastion. The connecting tunnels were sealed shut. No one knows who divided us, or who closed up the tunnels. Only that from that day on the girls and the boys lived separate lives.”
“I see.” He stared hard at his fingernails as if hoping he’d catch a glimpse of those events there. Of course, there was nothing at his fingertips to jog the memory. Instead, he sighed and shook his head. “I see…”
“Mott,” I said. “Ask Athena the question that’s on your mind now.”
Mott’s eyes met mine. There was a wordless communication. He thanked me for the prompt.
Athena gave another of her sad smiles. “What do you want to ask?”
Mott hesitated for a second, then: “How long ago is it since we talked as friends?”
“I remember exactly.” She gazed at him with unflinching eyes. “Twenty-eight years.”
“Twenty-eight?” He became flustered. “Twenty-eight? You’re wrong. It can’t be twenty-eight years ago since we last met.” He laughed—though there was splash of fear there. “I’m only sixteen years old!”
There was a commotion down the tunnel. Grunt breathlessly wove his way through the mass of girls. “Mott. We’ve got to get out of here!”
“We can’t yet,” Mott replied. “I can still hear firing from outside.”
“There’s no way we can stay in the tunnel…there’s about twenty of those gator buggers heading our way!”
* * *
—
Mott didn’t hesitate.
He shouted to Grunt, “Get everyone out onto the Factory Floor. John and me will hold this thing back.” He shot me a look. “Are you up to some dragon-slaying, Soldier?”
I took a tight grip of the lance. “Count me in.”
Athena started calling to the girls to climb into the machine and to follow Grunt.
Mott caught Athena’s eye. “Keep your heads down out there. It’ll be dangerous. Watch out for Flukes. And the air will be full of artillery shells.”
Athena spoke bluntly, “We’re not afraid to take risks. We all accept that more of us will die before today’s through.”
He nodded. Then he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted in his loudest parade ground holler: “Okay! We’re moving out! Follow the person in front of you! You’ll be crawling through the inside of a gigantic engine. There will be spinning turbines. There will be parts moving violently. Stay away from the moving machinery. Get out onto the Factory Floor, then take cover best you can until everyone’s out! Okay, move…move…move!”
As they filed into the guts of the machine, Mott and I made our way to the back of the line.
Sure enough, a pack of Gator-Raptors was heading along the tunnel toward us. They moved on four powerful legs with a swaying walk. Their dark blue skin glinted in our flashlight. Long snouts sniffed the air. The jaws parted to reveal sharp teeth. Worst of all: those human eyes, which were silvery in color. They looked like the eyes of someone who’d been weeping in grief.
“Stand next to me, John,” he murmured. “We don’t have much gas left. So fire in short bursts.”
“Yes, sir.”
He smiled, pleased that I’d accepted his status as commander. “And only fire when you can make physical contact with the tip of the lance. The jets of gas don’t travel far.”
Volume Ten Page 8