by John Keeble
Solon hits "message acknowledged" and turns back to the sala. His trained eyes scan the troopers. Something is wrong. The troopers are not keeping the prisoners under control. That one is not even watching them.
"Trooper! Eyes to the prisoners!" The trooper, one of the most senior fighters whose exemplary service inspires the younger recruits, lifts his smart rifle and points it at Solon. I should kill him for doing that.
Solon moves along the edge of the sala. The troopers follow him with hostile eyes. I understand. I feel as they do! We have been conditioned, controlled, exploited. We have been forced to kill our own kind. We want revenge!
He jerks around, like a human animal on a leash, as a voice pierces his thoughts. "Subcommander. Come here! I am Commander Balen of the FedUK Genetics Research Center."
"I know, Ambi Balen," he says before he realizes he is speaking. "I am Solon, son of Aindrea. I look different now because Commander Galen upgraded me."
A silence pools around Alice and Solon as the disclosure sinks in. "Solon," says Alice. "You were always such a clever child."
I can't focus. I'm not sure anymore. The troopers are wandering away from the prisoners. "I am following the orders of Commander Galen," he says. "I am not sure anymore..."
"Solon, you and your troopers are infected with a virus which is programmed to attack you at cellular and genetic levels. Your conditioning is breaking down. You will all die unless I help you."
"Help us? Why would you do that when you are our prisoner?"
"Look at your troopers. Examine yourself. You are dying. I can save you."
Across the Euphrates flooding, the first glow of dawn tints the morning mist. It gives Solon confidence. The transport drones will be here soon. Perhaps the medic on board can help us.
*
Fury builds in Galen like a wind-driven wildfire. Solon and the troopers are losing control. The prisoners will start running soon. He flicks the communications link to the Military High Command operations center. "This is Commander Galen. Are you watching the video stream from Delta Attack Squadron? Subcommander Solon is losing control. What are you going to do?"
"Yes, Commander, we are aware that your protégé is losing control. We have the matter in hand."
"What are you doing?" he demands.
"Please stay calm, Commander. We have a force of commandos in the transport drones. At the moment, we are trying to understand what your wife said to your protégé about a virus attacking our forces. Do you believe her claim?"
"It's possible but unlikely. Now get those commandos on the ground and make sure my prisoners are brought here."
Galen breaks the link. Halfwits.
He returns to the video stream. Dawn is painting details in the video feed from the village. "You have only minutes to decide," Balen is saying but the video trooper is wandering around like a banya junkie. She urges: "Solon, release us now. Let me save you and your men."
Solon's unsteady voice says, "I don't know what to do. Are you telling me the truth, Ambi Balen?" The video pictures show the half-lit buildings of the village but, frustratingly, not Balen or Solon.
"Solon, I designed the virus," she says. "It is splitting individual cells. You are being ripped apart cell by cell."
Galen considers. That's plausible. This cell conflict was found by human scientists half a century ago. Has she turned it into a weapon to use against me?
*
Jack's hands are numb. If the troopers don't loosen these bindings, they'll kill my hands. The thought shocks him and then he starts laughing. It won't matter. Alice will redesign my DNA and I'll grow new hands more to her liking.
"Jack, what's the matter with you?" Alice says sharply and others stare at him as if he is crazy.
He is standing on legs and feet he can hardly feel, naked and bruised. Max and Xam are in nets at his feet, and Alice, who had been talking to an officer on the edge of the sala, is waiting for his reply. He stops laughing and she turns back to the officer.
"Look at your troopers, Solon," she tells the officer. "They are confused; they're unable to function. My virus weapon is killing them. Soon the first ones will die as their cells split and evolve faster than their bodies can tolerate. Free us now. Let me save you all."
What's she talking about? We have no genetic weapon. Whispers from the past drop into place like raindrops making a puddle. Unexplained experiments. Comments about needing more than a warning system. The "protection upgrade" that everyone was forced to accept. Even me. Jack looks at her with new eyes. She has made a weapon. Us!
Solon, eyes glazed and movements sluggish, frees Alice's binding and gives her the decryption key to unlock Jack and the dogs.
She moves with lightning speed, freeing him and the dogs. "The four drones," she hurls at him and Aleksi. "If they land, we are finished. The commandos will kill us all."
She rounds on Aleksi and one of his wives. "Come with me," she tells them. "Jack, recover here until you can help. Solon. Solon! Aleksi, bring Solon. We'll free Kimon first – he can operate the village defenses."
Jack, the first pain of blood rushing through his hands and legs, pulls the unlocked nets apart to free Max and Sam.
A virus weapon. Like Galen's rot death virus. Is she mad?
*
Four transport drones crawl out of the mist two hundred feet over the Euphrates and head towards Eden Garden Village. They are slow and almost silent. Onboard each, eight elite commandos are expecting action after reports of confusion on the ground. The crews have deployed missile defenses but no one expects the escapees to have weapons. Even Delta Attack Squadron's guns are useless without ammunition.
"Delta squadron leader, this is transport drone leader," the drones' commander tells Subcommander Solon. "We are approaching your position. Prepare to load your prisoners."
"This is Subcommander Solon. Abort now. Return to your base."
A silent alarm lights on the commander's control panel. He mutes his comms link with Galen's boy on the ground. "Speak," he tells the alarm.
"That is not the voice of Subcommander Solon," the alarm says. "Prepare for a combat landing."
"When I need an artificial intelligence routine to tell me what to do, I'll let you know," the drone commander snarls.
It's too late to abort the operation. We've got the best fighters in the military. If we need to kill everyone on the ground and take back bodies to the great Galen, so be it.
The commander activates his comms link to the four drones. "Maximum alert," he says calmly. "Prepare for combat landing. Shoot to kill."
He feels an immediate thrust of power as the drones rocket skyward to approach the combat zone above the range of smart rifles and blasters.
"Commander, we are over the landing zone," the lead pilot says.
"Combat landing. Now!"
The pilot hands control to the combat landing system and the four drones pattern down in an aerial dance to minimize ground-fire risks. But no one expects an effective ground-to-air attack.
"Thirty seconds to combat landing," says the system. "Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, release safety locks on weapons, twenty-six..."
The commander waits. Now we'll see what Galen's "halfwits" can do.
*
Chapter 47
"Kimon, four transport drones are coming! They are carrying commandos," shouts Alice as she frees him from a sala support. "Can you stop them landing?"
Kimon, wild-eyed and eager to fight, squeezes her hand. "Yes," he says as he barges his way out of the sala. "If the troopers haven't destroyed my firing system."
He runs around the nearest houses and into his defense control tower. We fooled the troopers. They thought this was a water tower.
One glance into the sky shows time has run out: the drones are combat-landing, which means commandos ready to hit the village with their guns firing.
He arms his defenses and prays to Father Dick that the drone pilos choose the best place to land. The place I prepared. He picks up his
smart rifle. He knows an armor-piercing round is loaded but he checks it anyway. I'll get only one chance before the drones' defenses locate and destroy me.
Kimon, the freed military slave empowered to think and lead, waits for the drones to drop into his range. If only I could have survived to build the new world. He presses the fire button and watches the projectile open a hole in the nearest drone.
Flashes from the other drones vaporize him before the crippled craft turns over and plummets out of control.
*
Aleksi and his wife squeeze into Ali's cold room. He is nervous. The night, the attack, the inexplicable behavior of the troopers. Outside, Solon waits like a rebuild falling apart – an empty shell like the Galen-rebuild after Ali got him under control.
Ali opens the refrigerator made by Kimon from parts scavenged from their drone. She thrusts her hands through dick-knows-what until she grasps what she wants: four makeshift eye sprays marked with gold.
She hands one to Aleksi and one to his wife. She holds the other two and pulls a fifth spray, marked with silver, from the chiller.
"Ali, what is this?" Aleksi asks.
"Spray it into the eyes of the troopers," she says urgently. "It will handcuff them and save their lives."
A flash in Kimon's security zone lights up everything. A frightened heartbeat later an enormous crash in the forest rocks the ground.
"Quick," shouts Alice. "Spray now. Before the drones land the commandos." She paces over to Solon and uses the silver spray to soak his eyes, discards it, and runs into the dawn chaos with the gold sprays like guns.
Aleksi and his wife, a couple of paces ahead of Alice, bounce off panicked numan2s and spray trooper after confused trooper. A wildness grips Aleksi and he teeters on the edge of hysteria. We are being attacked. Everyone is panicking. And I'm spraying troopers!
*
The transport drones' commander tenses as the combat landing system opens the deployment doors and orders: "Prepare to attack!"
He can see the village chaos on the drone's external view screen – people are running in every direction and Delta squadron troopers are doing nothing to stop them.
In his ear pod, he can hear safety harnesses being snapped off and weapons being readied. They're eager. It's going to be a bloodbath.
*
Jack stumbles away from the sala, legs like rubber, with the dogs dancing around him. Numan2s are scattering in every direction.
"Aleksi, what're you doing?" Jack shouts.
There is no time for an answer. An explosion stops everyone momentarily and jerks them into new urgency and directions. A second blast lights up the trees separating the village from open ground to the north.
Jack smiles, a vicious pleasure coursing through him. Two more drones wrecked on Kimon's booby-trapped landing ground. What about the last of the four? We must destroy it before it lands!
He catches a glimpse of the drone as it powers upwards, escaping destruction. When he looks back to the ground, the village is almost deserted apart from dazed troopers. In the near distance, Alice and Aleksi's wife are spraying them like they are on a conveyor belt.
Alice pants up to Jack with Solon trailing behind her. "Thanks for your help," she says in that casual voice that masks fury from anyone who does not know her.
"Have you developed a virus weapon like Galen's?" he demands.
"Jack! The commandos are coming!"
Solon, recovering fast, looks more like the efficient young officer who arrived at the village. "Three of our transport drones have been destroyed," Solon says. "The surviving crew are requesting orders from me. The Military High Command says it's my responsibility as the officer on the ground and Galen's protégé."
Jack starts to answer but Alice holds up a hand and cuts across him. "The drone can land one kilometer north of the village. No one is to leave it. You will walk out to it. Fly back to Galen. Tell him how we deal with military attacks. Your troopers will stay here until the Military High Command has agreed not to attack us again."
"Will I survive, Ambi Balen?"
"I am Alice now. You will survive."
"I will be disgraced but I will be alive." He looks at the troopers wandering in the village. "And I won't be turned into mindless human animals like them."
*
Chapter 48
A stunned, depressed atmosphere permeates Eden Garden Village's survivors after the night's trauma and deaths. Most of the numan2s have crept back to their homes but others are missing, presumed too frightened to return. Twenty-one troopers killed in the attack have been dumped away from the village. The drone crash sites have been examined but nothing can be salvaged from the charred wreckage. No trace can be found of Kimon.
"It's a disaster. More than half of my repopulation work has been destroyed," Alice says as she and Jack inspect the scorched earth that was once Kimon's home and the village defense center. "One benefit is the huge increase in the number of fit young males that I can use for our repopulation programme," she adds.
Jack is coldly angry at their failure to foresee a river-borne attack, angry at the deaths, angry at Alice's secret development of a virus weapon, angry at everything. But his mood is tempered by their survival. "How many troopers did we kill?" he asks. "Were any of our people killed?"
"Only Kimon," she says. "The troopers had no ammunition. We were too valuable to be shot. Kimon killed seven troopers. You killed one and injured another. We did not find and spray thirteen troopers fast enough to save them. One is still missing, probably dead. We saved thirty-eight troopers, including the one you injured, and three officers for our repopulation program. And Solon was freed."
Jack sighs. "Galen won't give up," he says. "Solon will tell him all about us. The military will be back."
"Possibly. They have all the advantages. Satellite tracking. Drones. Arms. Troopers and special forces commandos. Only the rot death virus kept them trapped in their bases."
"Now they'll have detailed knowledge about us. Letting your nephew go might cost us dearly."
Alice slips her hand into Jack's and they stare at the empty, blackened space once occupied by a man who started as their enemy and ended as their brother.
"Jack, you want to survive but you also want the luxury of keeping your hands clean."
He waits for her to stick her point into him, but she is not going on until he answers. "I am what I am," he says.
"Yes, and I love you for it."
"But..."
"Jack, I let Solon go so that he could take a present back to Galen and the military."
He tears his eyes away Kimon's fate and looks at Alice. "The virus," he says. "You saved Solon and made him a carrier. You've started a new plague epidemic!"
"Let's say 'a warning.' Enough to stop them leaving their base. Enough to keep us safe."
"It's more than a warning. You'll kill them all!"
"I'm not a murderer, Jack. I slowed the rate of change produced by the virus. There will be enough time for Galen to save them – he will know it's a warning. He'll keep the military maniacs in their bases until he finds out what I'm doing."
There is a smell of charred wood in the village, a death smell very different from the life aromas of cooking fires. Voices are subdued and movements are slow, fearful even though the danger has passed. The wind is picking up and black storm clouds are building.
"Maybe the storm will wash us clean again," Jack says.
"Yes," she replies. "A new start for a new world."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Keeble is an international journalist with thousands of published articles and photographs to his name. He left his last paid job at The Guardian in London 12 years ago and has spent his time giving media services to NGOs, non-profits and individuals to promote animal and social causes. This work includes writing, photography, and videography. His books are: Brothers, Lovers, Killers, a chase thriller set in his favorite places in Southeast Asia and southern England; Dying To Write, a good-nature
d parody of writers groups; and Automatically Better, an unconventional photography guide that focuses on the creation of meaning and impact. His TV movie, Shadow Trade, is an undercover investigation of the dog meat trade in Thailand, and his YouTube Channel (113 subscribers, 120,000 views) is Volunteer Media Asia. The author is a lifelong animal advocate, sometimes as a writer, sometimes as an activist. He is also a lifelong vegetarian/vegan. And a science fiction fan since the 1950s BBC radio series Journey Into Space frightened the life out of him as a child. He now lives in Cuenca, Ecuador.