The feed splits into two, the right side displaying a non-descript older man wearing an understated but extremely expensive suit. The left side displays footage of a ragged group of forms being herded into a transport; thin hands are bound together, slipper shod feet are shackled. So restricted is their mobility that when one apparent straggler is herded along with the flickering end of one of the guard’s prods, nearly the entire line collapses.
“Thanks, the first thing this means is the level of violence is predicted to increase. The government is clearly trying a no-nonsense approach to punishment. I wouldn’t be surprised to see each of these terrorists strung up at the Capital’s gallows come tomorrow afternoon.” Bill starts off in a rush, seeming to gain steam the longer he talks. “With their conspirators dangling where everyone can see, I’m sure it will put a damper on the rest of their organization’s activities.”
Next to Jon, Ryan is dozing off, having heard this kind of blithe commentary before. Jon is close to following suit, his own eyes heavy from the dim light and embracing arm chair, until something in the pane showing the loading of the prisoners catches his eyes. There! That woman right on the edge of the group, the one walking with a limp and the hair that comes down to her waist. Jon remembers that limp; it had been less pronounced as she had helped The Professor capture them. But what really stuck in his mind is the ease with which she moves despite the limp. He feels wrong thinking of her as the cute girl with a limp, but he only knew her for less than a day before the explosion separated them. He slaps Ryan’s shoulder with the back of his hand to wake him up as another of the “terrorists” walks by, and Jon recognizes him too.
“Hey! Wake up,” Jon says as he slaps his friend again slightly harder. It has never been easy to penetrate the big man’s slumber, and now that they are both sleep-deprived, it is proving harder. Losing patience, he switches to a closed fist and punches Ryan in the soft bit at the top of his arm right below the shoulder. It works, and Ryan wakes up with a grumble.
“What do you want?” he asks, idly fending off a potential second punch with a loose wave of the offended arm.
“On the news. A couple of the people who were with The Professor when we tried to escape are being framed as terrorists. They say they’re going to be hanged in the Capital by the end of the week.”
“Um, hmm,” Ryan grumbles as his mind spins up to speed.
“We need to do something, we know they’re innocent!” Jon says.
Ryan evaluates the screen for a moment before responding.
“Fortunately the government is anything but spontaneous. That looks like a live feed, which means we probably have an hour before they actually start moving,” he says, his mind shifting into problem-solving mode. “We’re going to need something to stop the van, and then we’ll need to get the driver out somehow.”
“Getting the driver out shouldn’t be a problem,” Jon says, eyeing the collection of mostly full liquor bottles that line a shelf against the far wall, by all appearances simply collecting dust for their hosts.
“I like where your head is at.” Ryan smiles. “But how to get the van to stop? They have to have orders to blow through any obstacle. We can’t use another car to run them off the road. They’d be able to trace the car back to wherever we got it.”
“We could use that to our advantage,” Jon says, raising his hand to forestall the questioning look on his friend’s face. “Behind an obstacle that we know they’re just going to blow through, we hide something that will stop them.”
“I saw a shed in the backyard when we first were trying to hide. I bet we can find something in there that we can use.”
The shed proves to be a goldmine. Twenty minutes after sneaking across the yard, they have a rudimentary homemade spike strip. With it loaded in their hosts’ car, Jon heads back inside the house to see if The Professor is awake and able to understand where they are going.
Having breathed fresh air and with a goal to pursue, the basement, which had seemed comforting and cozy, now feels cramped and confining. The ceiling is low and the air musty. The Professor is still sleeping, only occasionally grumbling or twitching; there is little in the way of proof that he still lives.
Preoccupied with trying to find a sheet of paper on which to leave at least a cryptic message, Jon does not notice at first the obnoxious noises emanating from the speakers surrounding the screen. The sounds of a robot similar to one from a retro sci-fi horror movie prelude a garbled voice.
“This is a warning from the national weather service. Unseasonable and severe weather is expected in your area. Tornadoes and fist-sized hail are expected. Death and or serious injury will occur if caught outside. All roads in and out of the region are closed until further notice. Retreat indoors immediately. Have a nice day!”
Cursing vehemently under his breath, Jon dashes back upstairs to warn Ryan of the approaching storm. By the time he bursts through the weathered screen door, the horizon is rimmed by a towering phalanx of dark clouds. The clouds are approaching rapidly; the yellow and green tinted lightning that arcs between cloud formations casts an eerie flickering glow over the quiet neighborhood.
If Jon were superstitious, he’d suspect the neighborhood of falling victim to some storybook curse. The buildings look sickly, and the once friendly landscaping has become menacing.
“Storm coming,” he shouts as the wind whips up and tries to steal his words.
Ryan simply nods in understanding, a grimace on his face as he wrestles a large canvas cloth into the back of the car to cover their spike strip should they be stopped before they reach their target. Seeing that Jon is holding the door open against its automatic closure mechanism, he quickly battens down the car and jogs into the house.
As the door closes behind them, the pale light of the storm is slowly cut off as the automated storm shutters seal up all the openings. The kitchen darkens quickly, as its windows are relatively small. The last ray of external light pours in from the living room where the bright midday sun shines through the wide portrait window that overlooks the street. It’s only a matter of seconds before the light is cut from this window too. It takes longer for their eyes to adjust to the dim glow provided by the various appliances scattered throughout the house.
By the time they make it downstairs to The Professor’s bedside, the intensity of the wind has increased, and it can be heard howling around the house as it tries to find an opening to claw its way through. The house groans under the abnormal strain, its timber complaining but holding strong.
“Back so soon?” The Professor asks. His voice is strained but his cracked lips make a feeble attempt at smiling.
“There’s a storm coming in. We’d never make it through the road blocks or the storm itself,” Jon says, peering out the ground-level casement that is only protected by an old-fashioned metal grate as the hail starts pounding its way through the diamond-shaped openings. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been better,” The Professor says, obviously trying to keep in good spirits. “Still beats grading midterms.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Jon says, idly patting The Professor’s shoulder as the hail splatters into millions of sparkling shards. “We’ll keep an eye on things, you keep resting. Once the storm passes we might have to get on the move again.”
“Plus, no underpaid union transport driver is going to be out on the road if there’s a chance of a storm let alone the full blown tempest that seems to be brewing. We’ll make our move tomorrow,” Ryan adds, flopping back into one of the armchairs in front of the newscast, which is currently showing a shot from the municipal building overlooking the parking lot as it is pummeled by the storm. “Look, you can see the van right there.”
Jon’s gaze follows Ryan’s outstretched arm, and he gasps.
“They aren’t stuck in there?” Despite the fog on the van’s windows, several anxious faces are visible within the van over the feed. “They can’t leave them in there during the storm?!”
&
nbsp; But as the night wears on and The Professor drifts back to sleep, it becomes clear that they can and they will. It would seem that once the prisoners enter the van, custody has changed hands, and it is more hassle than a couple of terrorists are worth to transfer them back to the city’s jail in the building. With their sentences a foregone conclusion, it is hardly worth several forms filed in triplicate so that they are comfortable and safe during a storm.
The news cast grows weary of analyzing the single shot of a parking lot in the midst of a deluge and transfers to a loop of gruesome footage from yet another shooting at a school. But with a little searching, Ryan finds one of the seemingly endless government feeds showing the parking lot. The van remains stationary until sometime around midnight when a particularly massive gust of wind flips it on its side and blows it against a guardrail. The storm rages on, indifferent, showing no sign of letting up. Jon and Ryan are mesmerized watching the small metal van absorb the pounding from the storm.
Chapter 22
Foothills of the Western Mountains
A University Town
Lilianne struggles to wake up. She senses that she is somehow in danger. At least this time, her mind processes slowly, she can remember who she is. The sedative-induced fog slowly recedes enough that she becomes aware of a howling and pounding that wash over her in a seemingly endless succession of waves.
She attempts to move her arm to rub her eyes and hopefully crawl further out of the blackness, but her right hand is secured by her side. Confused, she tries again, and a pain lances upward from the broken wrist. After pondering her predicament, she tries the left arm; it is similarly restrained.
Her brain is slowly waking up, fighting out of the warm cocoon in which it had been nestled. Each small challenge with which it is faced allows her to slip through another layer of the drugs that have been deadening her synapses. Mustering her mental capacity, she forces open her eyes to discover more of her surroundings.
Instead of the harsh glaring light she had been bracing for, the light that had dominated the last location she can remember, she is greeted with a sickly glow that flickers, its intensity pulsing with the howling sounds. As her eyes begin to focus on the objects surrounding her, people begin to materialize out of the darkness, some of them with heads bowed, others straining their necks to look out small square windows. The windows are the source of the light.
Her gaze travels around examining each of the silent forms. The ones with heads bowed seem dejected by the slump of their shoulders, while those whose faces she can see seem anxious, continually glancing around. More of her senses are coming online, and she realizes that directly following an increase in the howling noise, the whole world seems to rock. She does not notice a change in the forms around her, but she feels them all move as if they are strapped in the hold of a ship.
Lilianne’s mind is now nearly fully aware, but before it can wake up completely three things happen nearly simultaneously. First, she connects the fact that her wrists are bound by glistening manacles to something underneath her and the fact that nearly all her visible world is swaying in unison to come to the conclusion that she is laying secured to the floor of a prison transport.
Second, before her mind can fully process the first, the small medical device strapped to her thigh realizes that its dosage of tranquilizer has worn off and extends a needle into her blood stream, releasing another dose of sedative.
Finally, while the world quickly fades from her consciousness once more, Lilianne realizes that the transport van she is strapped to the floor of is in the middle of a raging storm, which is causing the howling noise as it whistles around the metal vehicle. The final sensation she is aware of is vertigo as a particularly strong gust of wind lifts the transport off its wheels, and it starts tumbling over. Fortunately for her, she is fully unconscious by the time the van lands on its side and slides into the parking area’s guardrail with enough force to further damage her broken wrist. Had she been awake, the pain would have been excruciating, but the drugs manage to keep her unaware through it all.
Chapter 23
Space
Mountain Stronghold
The massive chunk of rock, once an earthbound mountain, appears to hang before the backdrop of stars. If the void of interplanetary space could transmit sound, the scene would still be eerily silent. The thunder from the engines on the rockets strung out behind the mountain in a loose line would be gone. The mountain itself is no longer emitting the steady pulse of its own engines. They drift through the void under their momentum, each emanating a cold silence.
The scene within each of the rockets is completely the opposite of their exterior appearance with the exception of one of the rockets. The fourth rocket in line is as lifeless on the inside as it appears on the outside. One of the crew in a desperate attempt to prove her loyalty to her earthbound commanders disabled the ship’s life-support systems and vented the atmosphere into the void of space. Its passages are now cold, dark, frost-covered forms slumped in the corners where the asphyxiation overtook them.
The next rocket in line is soon to join its fate. Directly after the general’s speech, a scuffle broke out in its command module, and an errant bullet punctured the pressure hull. Already everyone in that compartment has succumbed to the seeping cold of the void and the minimal air pressure. Due to incompletely installed and never-tested safety systems, the rest of the passengers are soon to follow. The doors sealed as expected at the first sign of a pressure drop, but the life-support system was left out of the loop, so slowly but surely the precious air and heat required to sustain the rocket’s inhabitants are being pumped into the command module and are bleeding out. A hole only slightly larger than a man’s finger will spell the doom of all five hundred people trapped in their compartments throughout the ship.
As the pressure and temperature steadily drop, panic spreads through the compartments. In some, they turn on each other and fights break out. In others, they band together to try and force their way to freedom, and in a select few, they attempt to comfort each other as they resign themselves to their fate. In each compartment, no matter the character of its inhabitant’s responses, they are unable to achieve anything meaningful to prolong their existence, the locking mechanisms having been quite thoroughly over designed.
The remainder of the rockets are each a scene of chaos, as the agents planted amongst the crew and command try to quell what they see as a blossoming mutiny while the rest of the contingent struggles to digest the general’s words.
The general’s rocket is only slightly more subdued, by virtue of the command staff loyal to the general outnumbering the government agents significantly. Even with the fiercely loyal core of officers, some who despite having only served under the general for a matter of hours recognize the integrity he represents, it takes nearly twenty minutes to secure the craft’s command module.
General Long sits on the command couch listening to the radio, which besides broadcasting bursts of harsh static is relaying chopped up threats, ultimatums, and pledges of support as the crews of the other rockets fight back and forth. The general sits quietly as the balance of power shifts across the fleet, as helpless to stop the snippets of violence that break through the static as he was to protect the family he had left behind. His crew, unsure of what to do, sits uncomfortably around him in silence. The unconscious form of the government agent conspicuously floats near the floor, wrists bound and a dirty sock stuffed in his mouth.
Suddenly a voice cuts through all the others on the radio, drowning out all the garbled pieces with its clarity. “Hailing all rockets in pursuit of the mountain,” the voice says. “Hailing all rockets. We wish to speak to your commander.”
General Long sits in silence, by all appearances turned to stone, his skin a sickly shade of gray that nearly matches the streaks at his temples. A long silence ensues as everyone within earshot of a radio throughout the fleet of rockets digests the simple address from the unknown party of which they are i
n pursuit. A staff member is about to reach out and shake the general’s shoulder when he visibly stirs himself and reaches for the microphone.
“This is General Long, commanding officer of the rocket fleet.” His voice is slow and quiet but steady. He speaks like a man who is already dead, and then lets out a sigh as he releases the transmit button, as if holding it down had exhausted him.
“We would like to discuss your unconditional surrender,” the voice states calmly.
The channel is quiet. Every person still alive throughout the fleet is frozen, riveted by the calm and assertive voice being broadcast into every compartment courtesy of a proactive communications officer who switched the conversation from the command band to all channels.
“General Long? Are you still there? We have halted your forward progress. We can easily destroy all the rockets in your fleet should you force us to defend ourselves.”
“Yes, I am still here. Can I ask to whom I am speaking?” he asks, stalling for time, trying to figure out what is actually going on. It is clear that they were sent to sweep a problem under the rug before it could reach the ears of the public. However, General Long doubts that anyone on Earth really knows what exactly is going on, having instead the knee-jerk reaction to deny and destroy the unknown. He had bought into the premise, the rush to protect people being kidnapped, at least partially knowing that it was the only way to protect what he loved. He realizes now that he had willingly deluded himself even though he had known the truth all along. Now with nothing to lose, something about the unknown, the mystery of who or what would steal an entire mountain and escape into space, unleashes a long-suppressed curiosity.
The line is quiet for a long moment before the voice answers.
“My name is David Gavitte, and I have beside me General Lampard, regional commander of the Resistance.” The embellishment of the Resistance’s size is lost on General Long as his military training kicks in to compute the strength of the Resistance that they can apparently steal entire mountains out from beneath the government’s watchful eye. Perhaps the reports he had assumed were exaggerated to keep the populace in an appropriate level of fear were in fact understated. If a lowly regional commander wields the power to stop his entire fleet of rockets in their tracks, he isn’t willing to endanger his entire command’s lives on the gamble that their threat was empty.
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