Bonds of Resolve (Cadicle #3): An Epic Space Opera Series

by Amy DuBoff

It was nearly nightfall by the time Wil and his companions were settled at the campsite for the night, their gear safely ferried to the shore. The ground beneath their bedding was uncomfortably firm after the hammock Wil had grown accustomed to over the past several months. However, he was too tired to care. We have a plan. And soon I’ll be back with Saera.

  Next to him, Mila shifted around in an attempt to get comfortable. “How do you sleep with the ground so still?”

  “It took me weeks to get used to the lack of a background mechanical hum.” Still, she has a point. The hammock itself was more comfortable, but Wil had found the gentle rocking of the boat to be smoothing. In his time on Orino, he had slept better than he had in the previous year back home. But, that was largely because the dreams about the Bakzen had receded—at least for the time being.

  “Loud and still. I don’t know how you do it.” Mila rolled over again.

  Wil settled into his own bedroll. “Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow we begin planning our attack.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Wil perched at the edge of the boat, focused on the front gate of Makaris outpost. The cloud cover hid the moon and made the night unusually dark.

  The plans were set and Wil had coached everyone through the attack. Months of recruiting, two weeks of intensive training, and hours of planning had all come down to that moment. Their night of action had come.

  “Capture, not casualties,” Wil reminded everyone.

  The first wave of Orino warriors, led by Tiro, nodded and began to slink along the dock, staying low to the ground and seeking cover behind crates as they inched toward the entry gate.

  The guard outside the front gate never saw the warriors coming. In one swift motion, he was pulled from his feet and gagged.

  Wil watched from a distance as Tiro took the keycard from the guard and opened the front gate. Silently, Tiro and the other warriors crept into the facility.

  Sounds of a single blaster shot and a cry of pain broke the night.

  Shite! Wil leaped out of the boat and ran toward the main gate. The plan had called for stealth, but they had been over all the contingencies. It’s okay. They know what to do.

  Wil could barely make out the doorway ahead in the dim light. He kept his footsteps silent as he dashed along the metal deck. When he reached the door, he heard light footsteps coming up behind him; without turning, he knew it was Mila. “Go back to the boat!” he hissed. She wasn’t part of the backup plan.

  “Tiro’s in there! He may be hurt,” Mila protested in a whisper.

  There wasn’t time to argue with her, and he knew she wouldn’t listen. “Stay behind me.” Wil pressed his back against wall next to the open gate and chanced a glance inside.

  The entryway was empty, but it smelled of scorched metal. Red lights down the side hall illuminated just enough for Wil to see evidence of the blaster shot on the wall. His warriors and the guards were nowhere to be seen.

  Without hesitation, Wil slipped through the door and followed the signs pointing to the main office down the left hall from the entry. Even if they couldn’t take the outpost quietly, they at least needed to keep the guards from calling for reinforcements before Wil had a chance to arrest Akka. Otherwise, a firefight would be unavoidable.

  The office was three doors down. Wil tried the handle. Locked. The electronic lock couldn’t be cracked without using his handheld and that would violate the internship terms. “Shite,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Are they inside?” Mila asked.

  “I don’t know. We need to sever the communications regardless.” Wil pressed his ear against the door, but he couldn’t make out any voices inside.

  “The guards must be—” Mila was cut off by the creak of a door opening between the entry and their place in the hall.

  Wil flattened against the wall, pulling Mila to his far side. He held his finger to his mouth for her to be quiet. She crouched, one hand on the hilt of her dagger.

  The door swung open the rest of the way with a groan, accompanied by low whispers.

  Wil relaxed and pushed off from the wall, recognizing the voice. “What happened, Tiro?”

  Tiro startled at the sudden question breaking the quiet, but he smiled when he saw Wil with Mila. “One of the guards spotted us inside the door. He clipped my arm with the blaster.” He looked down at his left arm, which was wrapped in a length of tan cloth.

  Mila frowned at the wound. “And the guard?”

  “Tied up inside.” Tiro swung the door shut and locked it with the keycard.

  “We need to get Akka,” Mila said to Wil.

  “Soon,” Wil assured her. “But our cover was blown. Taking out communications is our first priority.”

  “But the secondary team is supposed to—” Tiro began.

  “We went to the backup plan the moment shots were fired.” Wil held out his hand to Tiro for the keycard.

  Tiro relinquished the keycard, and Wil ran back to the office door. He swiped the card across the lock. Red. “Bomax.”

  “It didn’t work?” Mila asked.

  “Those guards must not have clearance to this room. But others might.” This just got dangerous. Wil groaned to himself. Time for Plan C. “Tiro, your team needs to hold this door. Don’t let anyone through. We’ll get Akka’s card—that’ll work for sure.”

  Tiro acknowledged his understanding with a nod, and the five other warriors took up positions facing either end of the hall.

  Wil slipped past them with Mila at his heels. At the entry, he turned outside and jogged a couple of meters down the dock. He gestured for the second wave of warriors to advance.

  “What happened?” Rolan, the group’s leader, asked as he padded up to Wil ahead of his warriors.

  “Change of plan,” Wil explained. “Help Tiro secure the first level while Mila and I go for Akka. One guard is in custody, but others may be hiding. Hopefully they haven’t been able to call for reinforcements.”

  “You can trust us,” Rolan replied, and he motioned for his warriors to follow.

  Wil turned his attention to the heart of the mission: capturing the man in charge. “Let’s get Akka.”

  Wil and Mila snaked their way through the lower level toward the staircase. He checked that it was clear, then waved Mila up the stairs. Only dim red light illuminated the narrow passage.

  A short hallway with two doors was at the top of the stairs. One was cracked open, revealing it was a washroom.

  Mila pointed to the door on the opposite wall and Wil nodded. She mouthed a countdown. On “one,” she barged through the door with Wil.

  A man with dark hair was hunkered behind his bed, grasping a blast gun in his tanned hands. Akka. “Who the fok are you?” He charged the weapon.

  “Put the gun down,” Wil instructed.

  “I heard you shoot the guard downstairs,” Akka’s brown eyes narrowed with spite. “I’m not doing a foking thing you say.”

  “They fired on us.” Wil positioned himself between the gun and Mila, readying a telekinetic shield. “On authority of the TSS and the High Dynasties, I am placing you under arrest for suspicion of racketeering, abuse of power, and professional negligence.”

  “You’re out of your minds! Do you know who I am?” Akka protested.

  “Do you know who I am?” Wil countered. “Tie him up,” he said to Mila and tossed her a length of metal twine from inside his jacket pocket.

  Mila pulled Akka’s hands behind his back, making no effort to be gentle. “You’re filthy scum,” she spat into his ear.

  “Let’s just get our job done,” Wil said, hoping to calm her. He scanned the surfaces of the room and spotted a keycard on the nightstand. Wil clipped it to his pants.

  Mila finished securing Akka’s hands and shoved him to his feet.

  “Come on,” Wil said and directed Akka down the stairs. At the base of the stairs, Wil turned out toward the courtyard, where he spotted a mesh metal fence. “Up against there.” He pulled out additional lengths of met
al twine from his pocket and secured Akka to the fence.

  “Keep an eye on him. I’m going to disable the communications,” Wil said to Mila and headed back inside.

  He was about to enter the hall toward the central office when he heard a shout from outside. Wil spun around and rushed back out to where he’d left Mila.

  Wil froze in horror when he stepped into the courtyard.

  Mila was standing over the prisoner, a knife gleaming in a thin beam of moonlight peeking through the clouds.

  Heart racing, Wil ran forward to stop her. “Shite, Mila, no!”

  The knife plunged into Akka’s chest. Thick, dark blood poured out. He gasped twice before slumping against his restraints.

  Wil pulled her back as she tried to stab him again. “Fok! Why? We—”

  Mila stared at the dead man, tears streaming down her face. “He killed my mother.”

  “What?” Wil’s gut wretched. He’d been forced to kill, himself, while escaping from the Bakzen, but seeing death up close… the vacant eyes and pooling blood—it was a gruesome glimpse of the casualties of war that awaited him.

  “My mother starved to death so that I could eat.” Mila dropped the knife to the ground and fell to her knees sobbing, directly in the puddle of blood spreading out from the body. “He was a foking bastard and he deserved to die!”

  He did. Wil pulled her to her feet and away from Akka’s corpse. “They’ll arrest you. You’ll spend the rest of your life in a prison colony.”

  “I don’t care,” Mila said, wiping her tears with her blood-stained hands. “It was worth it.”

  Footsteps sounded from the entry. Wil turned to see Tiro approaching.

  “I heard shouting. The rest of the facility is secure,” Tiro began. He noticed the body slumped against the wall. “Fok, what happened?”

  “Mila stabbed him,” Wil said. “He’s dead.”

  Tiro’s face contorted with alarm and horror. “Fok! Everything was coming together, Mila. Petre had given us his blessing. We could have had a life together!”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I had to. He needed to die. I couldn’t let anyone else be hurt because of him.”

  Tiro looked to Wil, his eyes pleading. “You can’t let them take her away to prison.”

  I don’t want to see her end up like that, either. Wil’s mind raced. “The Communications room is still locked down?”

  Tiro nodded.

  Wil assessed Akka’s body. “Okay, get the others. We need to clean this up.”

  * * *

  Saera and the other Trainees filed into the lecture room. It was the one hall she’d seen at Headquarters that could accommodate the whole group.

  High Commander Banks stood behind the front podium, calmly surveying the young, inquisitive faces of the students. Cris Sights and Scott Wincowski stood to his right.

  Saera settled into her chair in one of the middle rows next to the other Primus girls.

  “I thought they’d talk to us in smaller groups,” Elise whispered to her.

  “It’s more efficient this way,” Saera replied. And more peer pressure for us to stay.

  Banks held up his hand to quiet the room. When all eyes were on him, he began, “You’ve reached the end of your first year. Tradition holds that we offer you a choice: stay with the TSS and continue to grow, or go your own way. We will now give you the context to make that choice.”

  Saera leaned back in her seat, arms crossed. Or half-truths, anyway. I want the real story from Wil.

  “Some of you may have heard of the Bakzen,” Banks continued. Several members of the audience nodded. “The Bakzen are becoming an increasingly greater threat as time goes on. We fear that war is coming. And if—when—it does, our Agents will need to be on the front lines. If you don’t have it in you to join that fight, this is your one chance to get out.”

  A murmur of surprise rippled through the Trainees.

  Saera was more interested in Cris’ reaction at the front of the room. His expression was impassive on the surface, but his posture was rigid. Something about Banks’ statement wasn’t genuine.

  “We tell all the Trainees at the end of their first year. We’ve been telling them for a long time. With every new cohort, the likelihood of war increases. You have to ask yourself: are you ready for that commitment?” Banks surveyed the faces in the room. “That is all. You have one week to decide if you will stay. Thank you.” He hurried out of the room.

  Cris stepped up to take his place. “Some of you might have questions. I’ll hang back if you want to talk.”

  Saera couldn’t be sure, but she thought he looked right at her for a moment. If Wil knows he’s going to step up as a commander, that war has to be coming soon.

  The students rose to go. At the bottom of the side aisle, Saera hung back from the others.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Nadeen asked.

  Saera shrugged. “I don’t know anything about the Bakzen, being from Earth. I just have a couple questions. I’ll catch up with you.”

  Nadeen nodded and left with the rest of the Trainees. Saera was alone with Cris and Agent Wincowski.

  “I can handle this, Scott,” Cris said.

  The other Agent departed and closed the door behind him.

  “What wasn’t the High Commander saying?” Saera asked. “Wil hinted that there’s something going on, but he wouldn’t say what.”

  “You are quite perceptive.” Cris sighed. “If I tell you anything, you have to keep it to yourself.”

  Saera nodded. “Of course.”

  Cris took a deep breath. “So, there’s another division off the TSS codenamed ‘Jotun’...”

  * * *

  The fire crackled as Petre tossed on another fuel block distilled from whale blubber. Wil had come to find the scent comforting over the last several months. His chest tightened thinking about his impending departure and what was to come.

  “The terms are agreeable,” Petre said, nodding to the representative from the Northern Seafarers. The other representatives nodded their consent, as well.

  “Then it’s settled.” Wil laid out the official treaty Petre had penned on a piece of leather. The document established terms for equal supply distribution going forward, proportional to population size and access to the natural resources on the planet. Each of the village representatives had contributed to the terms, and all had approved the wording.

  Wil passed the parchment around the circle for all of the representatives to sign. One by one, each took the pen and signed their name and the name of the represented village. Petre was the last to sign his name. He handed the parchment back to Wil.

  Wil took the parchment with a heavy heart. It was the remaining criterion to meet the parameters for his internship mission. He laid it out on the metal deck plates and pulled out the handheld that was his only link to the Agents monitoring him from above. He took a picture of the signed document and saved it as an attachment to his final daily journal entry. As soon as he hit “send,” it would only be a matter of hours before the Agents came to retrieve him.

  “What does your report state?” Petre asked, glancing at a nervous Tiro and Mila sitting just outside the representatives’ circle.

  Did I call Mila out as a murder? “What happened at the supply outpost is on all of us. They can’t blame everyone, and so no one can be punished,” Wil replied.

  The village representatives nodded slowly. Hal, from the Northern Seafarers, looked Wil in the eye, “You have truly shown you take our best interest to heart. I only wish the High Dynasties showed us that same favor.”

  Wil swallowed. Not all of the High Dynasties are the same. “I have long known there are issues with the current governmental system, but my experience here has only highlighted those problems. I hope to one day right those injustices.”

  “You have already done so much for us,” Petre said. “We don’t expect you to do more.”

  But who else can? Wil took a deep breath. “I want to be honest with yo
u. You put your trust in me, so I want you to know it’s not ill-placed.” He looked around at the faces watching him with renewed interest. “So I speak to you now as an heir to Sietinen.” A low murmur spread throughout the group. “What Makaris did to you is not the way of the High Dynasties. I will use whatever influence I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “You are heir to Sietinen?” Samuel asked, mystified.

  Wil ventured a small smile. “Well, second in line.”

  Over Petre’s shoulder, Mila looked shocked. She gripped Tiro’s hand tightly a mixture of confusion and awe in her eyes.

  “And why do you reveal yourself to us now?” Hal asked.

  “Because I couldn’t leave with you thinking that no one in the High Dynasties cared.”

  “So you are leaving us?” Petre asked.

  “I’ve accomplished what I came here to do.” Wil looked down at his handheld. “As soon as I send this report, my mission is complete.”

  Petre looked to the other council representatives. “He has shown himself to be one of us. We should extend him the respect we would one of our own.”

  Hal nodded. “Can you delay sending your report?”

  Wil hesitated. “For a while. Why?”

  Hal rose. “It is time we honor you.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Saera, I’m really impressed,” Agent Katz said, leaning back in her chair. “I can’t believe you didn’t say anything sooner.”

  “It was only a drop of water.” Saera looked around Katz’s office. It was small compared to the Lead Agent’s office where she sometimes visited Cris, and very simply decorated with a single holopainting, two chairs and a touch-surface desk. She always felt antsy during these monthly check-ins.

  “Still, most don’t begin experimenting with object levitation until their second year as an Initiate.”

  Saera returned her focus to her instructor. “Well, you gave me a great foundation. It just came to me.”

  Katz nodded. “Nonetheless, it’s quite an accomplishment. I’m glad you decided to stay and continue your training—I’d hate to think about you experimenting too much on your own.”