“Would you like for me to help you remember?” she offered.
The harder he tried to recall, the worse his amnesia became. He remembered the war. Images of street riots after the armistice played in his mind like a day old memory. He recalled frantically searching the Romanian refugee camps for his mother and his sister. The memory of learning they had perished in the nuclear fire was again so heartbreaking, he wanted to crawl on the cold floor and stay there until he died.
His saving grace from that humiliation was a shrouded embrace by loving arms. It eased his torment. As if in a passing dream, he couldn’t identify his savior. He knew her. Every ounce of his mortality assured him, he knew her.
She kissed him. The therapy room was an illusion. He was in obscurity, yet he was not alone. She was with him. Her body and his were of one tangible strand. It was no delusion brought on by a weary mind; he loved this angel and she loved him in return. He strained to pierce the veil hiding her face. He wanted to condemn heaven for keeping her from him.
“Let me see you,” he pleaded.
Light surrounded them and when he focused his vision, it was Milari’s smile greeting him. A voice not hers whispered, “You are a father.”
A gasp from the real Milari broke her psychic grip. He was again in the therapy room, and not some far off place of his lurid fantasy. He was weak from the trance, but he could see her hand hovering near his forehead with fingers extended and penetrating. The crystal pendent between her breasts blazed with a star’s intensity, but died out when she lowered her arm.
“A child?” she shouted.
Emil Pavel lacked the energy to keep his head upright. He stared down at the cold floor, not aware of his tears as they fell from his cheeks.
They broke me, he sobbed. To his tormentor, he whispered, “Please, stop.”
Milari allowed him to cry in peace.
“The child will jeopardize everything,” she said. “I cannot allow this to happen. My master must be told.”
She motioned for the guards. As they moved to obey her orders, the door exploded. A chunk of shrapnel sliced through the one closest to the entrance. It was dead before hitting the floor. The second guard reached for a weapon. Several bullets tore through its armor and the human parts of the torso, killing it before it could get off a single round.
A klaxon wailed throughout the facility.
The shockwave from the breach disturbed Emil’s equilibrium. His slumped body hung to the chair by the restraints on his wrists. The last thing he saw in the mental haze was Milari crawling like a frightened rat.
She turned and screamed, “How dare you bring violence here!”
Blood and brain tissue exploded from her head as a bullet ripped through her skull. Emil lost consciousness.
He awoke on the floor with a small hand tapping his face. The alarm returned to rap his eardrums. His eyes focused on the smile of Adi Vasile. The last time he saw her, she looked like a schoolgirl, and not the hardened officer now hovering over him. Her cheeks were stark and her complexion sullen. She had become an old woman at twenty-eight.
“Haiduc, are you okay?’ she asked in Romanian. “It’s me Adi.”
Haiduc. He never liked that infernal name.
“Yeah, I’m okay. How — how did you find me?”
“Nice to see you again, sir. Can you stand?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
Adi helped him to his feet with a tug, supporting his posture as he tried to stand straight. He noticed Vladu, another member of his crew, guarding the doorway. The pudgy lad jerked with ramped tension. Both he and Adi wore survival gear consisting of silicone thermal suits and thick coats of tough burlap. Protective air masks hung below their necklines.
“Where in hell are we?”
“Bottom of the Mississippi River rift, not far from St. Louis. I’m sorry, but we’re in a bit of a hurry. Save the questions for later.”
This was the first time in over three years he knew where he was. He should have known by the amount of dust in the air and the lingering stench of decay.
Adi produced a small bag from under her coat and handed it to him. Inside was his gear. “Here, you’ll need this, sir. Funny thing, I remember you being a lot fatter, so the suit probably won’t fit right. But, it should work.”
As she helped him strip off the prison clothes and don the survival suit, she couldn’t help but stare in disbelief at his gaunt flesh. She was dressing a corpse, not a man.
Somewhere in the distance, synchronized explosions drowned out the siren’s blare. Smart girl, Emil thought. She showed up with an exit strategy. He had a weakness for smart women.
Vladu helped him walk with some dignity as they left the room. The facility staff, preoccupied with keeping order amid the chaos in the camp, left the first leg of the escape route thankfully unguarded.
Emil got a gut reaction; there might be collateral damage among the brigend population. In times of war, casualties were expected. But, dying like a caged animal was no way for a warrior to meet his end. These veterans were just dispirited souls the world had discarded. Their only true crime was being on the losing side. Their unjust reward was a sentence to die in this pit, forgotten by the same people they once defended.
The notion sickened him. He was not angry with Adi. Instead his anger was with the Alliance and their Zolarian masters for putting these unfortunate veterans in this appalling situation. It’s one more sin he would make the Alliance pay for.
Adi ran point through the maze of corridors and compartments. Although he had been to the therapy room on dozens of occasions, in his current condition, he was not of much use. Yet, judging from the indecisive pattern they were traveling in, he could tell Adi wasn’t leading them out.
“Do you know where you’re going, Commander?”
“Yes, this way.”
“That’s not how we got here,” Vladu snapped.
Adi ignored both men and continued the trail away from the danger elsewhere. The passage opened into a wide bay with many intersecting catwalks high above the floor.
She signaled for them to stop and they crouched next to a recess in a bulkhead. The boy was antsy. Emil didn’t blame him, for he too knew something was wrong, but felt under the circumstances it wasn’t right to question his first officer’s decisions. She was in charge of this rescue, not him. For this reason alone, he remained quiet and trusted her leadership.
While they gathered their bearings, Emil had an itch crawl up his spine and settle in the gutter of his brain. There was a presence calling out to him. It was not a person, or an inkling, but an impulse drawing him away.
“Sir,” she nudged him. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t answer her. He understood they risked a lot trying to liberate him, but he had to take charge of the mission.
“You two stay here.”
“Sir —”
He gestured for silence as he reached around her waist and grabbed her forty-five caliber P-86 pistol. He gave Adi no choice but to obey as he went off alone into the unknown. Emil hated keeping her out of the loop, but how could he explain his actions if he wasn’t sure of them himself?
“They broke him, I tell you,” Vladu ranted. “Look at him.”
“Shut up.”
“He’s been compromised.”
She snatched her partner by his collar and yanked him within an inch of her reddening face. “Get this straight — I trust him more than I do you. Now, shut your mucking hole.”
She shoved him and he wobbled off his feet. He got the point and didn’t challenge her again.
When Emil reached the other side of the bay, he entered a separate passage. There was one light illuminating the path and it wasn’t enough to show the way. He had to skim against the wall for a bearing. At this depth within the facility, the lulled klaxon almost sounded lyrical.
The tugging sensation intensified on his cerebellum. He should have been weary of trusting any mysterious urges, yet he continued into t
he belly of the beast, impervious to skepticism.
His shuffling in near black concluded at a dead-end. A single beam shone over a locked vault with a large oval door. There was no bar nor spindle to open it, only a biometric pad of transparent glass on the right side of the door frame.
Emil felt like a senile old fool, allowing a gut-feeling to lead him on a wild chase. He wanted to turn around and head back, but the sensation wasn’t letting up. He scratched his beard, confused and uncertain of his next move. Seeing how he was past the point of no return, he decided to keep going. The problem was the vault door. Only the biometrics of an authorized person could trigger it to unlock. Something suggested he give it a try.
He needed to see what was inside. “Well, here goes nothing.”
He placed his right hand on the glass. Seconds elapsed before the pad emitted a bluish glow, outlining his fingers with a corona. The light became green and the device chimed. The loud thumping knocks of tumblers rotating echoed along the corridor. The seal broke and the door shifted slightly out. He used the last of his strength to swing it open.
He stepped inside the white interior. There was light everywhere, but no visible source responsible for it. In the center was an invisible pedestal. Sitting on the podium was a crystal much like Milari’s, except more magnificent in color.
His reasoning betrayed him. The crystal spoke his name. He had heard the voice before, during his hallucinated intimacy with her. What was it saying?
He struggled to gather his sanity, hating his feebleness. Despite acknowledging the crystal’s influence, he couldn’t resist moving toward the pedestal. He trembled as he reached for it. There was nothing else except him and the ora. A nagging question tugged at him – had he seen this thing before?
His fingers touched it.
He was no longer in the vault. There was nothing, except a bright void. His feet stood upon nothingness. A high pitch resonance penetrated him and he fell in agony, clutching his head. He had never felt pain like this before. It was as if a hot scalpel was dissecting his brain and peeling away the layers. He opened his mouth to scream, but he couldn’t make a sound.
As quickly as it started, the pain disappeared. He lingered in the vacuum. In the briefest of seconds, he saw an angel.
The high pitch gave way to the wailing of the siren and his nerve endings came alive once more. He was supine on the floor of the vault and Adi’s blonde locks floated above him once again.
“Haiduc?”
“I told you to stay put.”
“When have I ever done what I was told?”
She tried to help him, but he stood up without her assistance. Relieved of the infirmity, he acted years younger. The change shocked her.
“How long was I out?”
“I don’t know. You were like that when we got here.”
“We got to go.”
When he looked back, he saw the perch empty of its trophy. There was no time to waste wondering where the crystal ended up. He pushed Adi and Vladu out of the vault.
With renewed direction, he led them through the labyrinth. Somehow, he remembered the way out, or at least he was giving the impression he did. Either way, his crew followed without question as they ran upstairs, darted across catwalks, and leapt fissures to adjacent platforms above the main processing plant. There came a point when he realized he was too far ahead of his team and had to slow his pace. Even with their youthful vigor, they struggled to match his renewed vitality. He thought nothing of it.
The eventual appearance of Vityaz troopers on the ground slowed their egress further. The squad leader’s electronic voice shouted out a set of orders and the cyborgs fired on them. Shots ricocheted off metal surfaces. Vladu panicked and returned fire. A couple of misses motivated him to back off.
Adi downed three Vityaz with her trusty rat-gat. She did so by hitting the soldiers in their one vulnerable spot — the narrow opening between the torso plates in the armor. An impossible display of marksmanship under ideal conditions, yet she managed to do it while running for her life.
They fought to get to the third level platform where two more Vityaz squads intercepted, forcing them to scuttle for whatever cover they could find. Adi and Vladu tucked beside a doorway. Emil was not so fortunate and had to squeeze behind a thin support column. Bullets dinged off pipes millimeters from his head.
“Haiduc, here!” She waved to him.
He saw Vladu pass to Adi the unmistakable slick tube of a Petrov RPG launcher. She set it on her shoulder, aimed, and fired a projectile at their attackers. The fiery diversion gave Emil the chance to dive into the doorway. She pulled him to her by his coat collar while Vladu slammed the heavy door shut, trapping them inside.
He was going to ask her where she got the RPG, but he saw the full rack of rocket launchers behind her.
An armory. They somehow managed to trap themselves inside a vast armory with thousands of loaded crates, stacked neatly to the ceiling in never-ending rolls.
“They’re going to blow the door! We’re dead!” Vladu cried.
“I don’t think so,” Emil countered.
“What makes you so sure?”
He pulled a tarp from a crate to show a cache of bombs to the junior crewmen. The old adage stuck between a rock and a hard place sounded appropriate. What they needed was a plan and quick. He had been in many predicaments worse than this one on hundreds of ops, but he always lucked his way out of them at the last moment. This particular impasse though, he was not so sure of.
Vladu was coming unglued. With Adi’s aggressive coaching, he held his courage. Emil looked around and inspected the ordnance at hand.
They could hear the Vityaz outside, hard at work torching the door's bulky metal hinges. Emil’s blood swelled with the anticipation of making a last stand. Returning to captivity didn’t sit well with him. Luckily, they had enough explosives to obliterate the whole damn place if they lost the fight. The other prisoners would perish along with them, but at least it would free them from the yoke of enslavement.
Adi pulled his arm and pointed at the closest wall where rocket-packs were sitting conveniently on their cradles. A quick check confirmed they had full tanks.
"Well, it's better than nothing. At least we'll get some distance between us and this place before running out of petro."
"We don’t have to get far, sir. The Bandit is close."
She went for the packs and handed one to each man. The operation was simple enough. Equipped with an artificial-intelligence navigational system, the pack was intuitive to the user’s inputs. In layman’s explanation; all you had to do was make the slightest move in the direction you wanted to go and the pack would do the rest. The burning propellant was formulated to safely disperse ninety-five percent of the heat after expulsion. With the throttle integrated in the buckle of the harness, the entire assembly was no bigger than a small rucksack.
They masked up. Emil signaled to the others the go-sign. With a twist of their throttle knobs, each pack’s dual exhaust ports fired.
Adi snatched a RPG tube from a rack and aimed it at the ceiling while Emil and Vladu hunched over to shield their bodies. A flick of the trigger and the ceiling exploded, creating a gaping hole wide enough for them to escape. The breaching explosion didn’t detonate the cache. They breathed a collective sigh of relief; they were still alive.
Out of the armory they soared, flying straight through the intersecting catwalks and the gauntlet of Vityaz gunfire. Adi flew point. Vladu assumed second in the formation, but trouble with his pack’s stabilizer made his flight erratic. He dropped back to the rear. Along the way, he clipped a Vityaz, knocking the trooper to its death.
Emil’s mask provided instantaneous digital data on airspeed and altitude. The avoidance telemetry plotted an escape trajectory, but he had no need for it since Adi was laying out the course for them. All he had to do was stay on her boot heels.
The enemy barrage increased the closer they got to the top. After clearing the facility,
Emil could see the damage from Adi’s diversionary trick. More than half of the camp’s structures were burning. The overwhelmed garrison personnel were fighting the fires as well as a full-scale prisoner riot. When the team streaked overhead, the freed brigends raised their hands to cheer on the valiant escape.
Once in open sky, he could see a dust storm on the horizon. The site of it formed a lump in his throat. He knew Adi must have seen it too, but she showed no sign of altering her current track away from its path.
He was about to order her to change course, when out of the rift, an Alliance battle-cruiser emerged with weapons blazing. They scattered to avoid the discharging flak. Several rounds ripped through Vladu’s chest and the pack’s tank, igniting the fuel. Engulfed with burning propellant, he howled to an awful death.
Adi’s voice cut across the tel-link, “Haiduc, fly toward the Bandit’s transponder.”
On his mask’s display, he saw a pulsing red dot appear in the lower right quadrant. He leaned toward the blip and his flight changed in accordance. They were now heading into the storm.
The wager worked, the cruiser broke off pursuit. Not even the mighty Global Alliance was crazy enough to chance ninety-knot winds. However, the Romanians were that insane.
They entered the storm’s terrible wrath. Emil twisted the throttle knob to maximum and exercised every fiber in his body to keep some manageable control. He couldn’t see anything but abrasive sand blasting his mask. Adi called out to him, but the wailing wind drowned the comm signal. The Bandit’s red blip grew fast on his screen.
A collision alert flashed and he jerked his body backwards. The last second maneuver saved him from smashing headlong into the hull. He skipped on the surface until he smacked into the antennae array. Unconsciousness overtook him for a third time.
Everything seemed blurry and he questioned whether he was dead. Noises were just as incoherent, but they improved along with his sight.
He was lying on the deck of his ship, the Crimson Bandit, in the main cargo hold near the port side airlock. His protective mask was off and he was breathing in the ship’s recycled air. Its staleness meant freedom, and home.
Brigends (The Final War Series Book 1) Page 2