by Jason Luthor
“You left the president behind?”
His eyes sharpen at me. “I made a tactical decision that, if the president was already dead, then the best course of action was to fall back and bide my time. Wait, until I could rally the militia. Unless you think I should have volunteered to die for a man that would have already been dead by the time I got to him.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry, it’s just . . . so cold.”
Martin nods as he breathes in deeply. “I feel it. I regret. I made the decision I thought was best, but . . . I’m not going to stand here and tell you that I’m happy with what I did. But I know the president would have been mad as hell if I’d gone back, only to get myself shot dead.”
“You’re probably right.”
“You, though. Let’s take care of you. Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“I chose these tunnels for a reason. Didn’t you study the map?”
“I tried. There was kind of a lot in there.”
“But you know the basics. The roads up top and the best ways of getting around the backstreets.”
“Yeah. I made sure everyone does. Every city block leader was drilled on all of this.”
“You’re a good soldier, lieutenant, even if you’ve spent the last few months convincing yourself otherwise,” he tells me as he takes me farther down the tunnels. “A long time ago, the entrance to these tunnels were closed down, but you can still navigate around the old tunnels if you want. You can get around large parts of the city down here.”
“I’ve stumbled on some old picture, here and there. Floating trains that took people across the city, floating over maglev tracks as they shot across town.”
“Then you’ve only seen the newer pictures. In the old archives, we’ve got photos that were preserved of this place from when the trains actually traveled on the rails. Before Pocket Space generators, they used overhead wires to send electricity powering through the train. It’s really something, seeing photos of people who used to wear suits and ties every day to get to work. Like staring into another world.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a history buff.”
“You think I always wanted to be in the militia? I wasn’t born with a gun in my arms.”
“Okay, but then what did you want to be?”
“Not a soldier. Not originally. I used to spend time scavenging the unpowered parts of the city, looking for anything I could find from the Old World.”
We’re passing beneath arches that are laid with this gorgeous tile and chandeliers that are hanging from the ceiling. They haven’t been powered in centuries, but they still look beautiful. It’s like walking into the past. Even with everything going on, I can just imagine what life was like, back before all this fighting. You know, when people woke up, walked down the sidewalk and down into the tunnels, hopping on trains that took them across town and to work. I can only imagine what it was like back when the power was on and the tile glowed under the light. “Are you sure you picked this place just because it’s well connected?”
He steps onto an upcoming platform and helps me up, smiling as he pulls me off the tracks. I can’t help but notice the lift bike sitting outside. “It was just good fortune that the best fallback position in the city was a place like this.” As soon as I’m on the small platform, he puts a hand on a door and pushes in, leading us into huge, lit room.
I have to stop and catch my breath when we step inside. There’s crates in there that I immediately recognize. “Weapon crates?”
“Rifles. Grenades. The basics. The one place we never really gave Yousef access to was the Green Zone. Conveniently, we’ve always kept a large stock of weapons there. But you should know that.”
“I’ve never seen the weapon storage in the Green Zone, so I’ve never really known how much weaponry we have there.”
“Not enough, but we can distribute weapons throughout the city using these tunnels, if we’re careful about it. Using these tunnels, we can actually empty right into the Green Zone itself using hidden access doors built into the old infrastructure. We can even get militia members around.”
“But the subway entrances are all cut off.”
“Yes, the main entrances. This city’s old, though. You read the plaque.”
“1900.”
“The city fathers built countless secret entrances into the subway tunnels. They’re small, basically just doors. If you had to get a hundred troops out, they’d die in a slaughter as they tried to squeeze through. Move them secretly though, and you can reinforce positions throughout Central, just as long as you don’t bring too much attention to yourself. But, again, we still run into the problem of just not having enough people or weapons.”
“That’s going to change. Jackie’s out there.”
“So, she did survive? I thought there had to be a reason there were so many patrols out there earlier.”
“She did. She’s going to go get reinforcements, and she said she’d try and pull most of Yousef’s troops out of the city. After that, we’d have a fighting chance with whoever was left.”
“Did she give you a timeframe?”
“No.” I frown as I look away. “Actually, she didn’t look too good last time I saw her. Yousef put a hole right through her stomach with a blast from his hand.”
Martin stares at me like I’m crazy for a long second before shaking his head. “I guess that does line up with him blowing the roof off of Central Prime. If she got shot by something like that at point blank range though, how do we know she survived?”
“She did. Believe me, I know.”
“Lieutenant, military strategies can’t be developed based on hunches. There are lives on the line. There’s—”
“Colonel,” I say back, my voice dripping acid when I do. “She’s alive. You don’t know Jackie. Even after all this time, you don’t know her. I do. She’s alive, and she’ll get in touch the second she can.”
“Okay,” he says with a bow of his head. “To be totally fair about it, I was wrong about her before. I’m trusting you on this one.”
“Good. Then maybe we should start thinking about getting ready to fight back.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
Highpoint Waystation Log 182,512
It must be a couple of days that I’m waiting, a time when I’m basically watching the kid around the clock. She’s got me so turned around, I forget to keep logs for the first time in something like five hundred years. Once Dragyn finishes doing its thing, the Creep I’ve put into Jackie’s body starts finishing up the job. All I can do by that point is watch and wait, making sure that her vitals stay where they should and her body’s patching itself up. By day three, her stomach’s completely repaired itself, internal organs and all. That doesn’t bring her out of that coma, though.
No, that takes a couple of days longer. I’m sitting in the main lobby, trying to pass time and pretend I’m not worried by keeping an eye on the outside world, when I hear footsteps from the hall behind me. By the time I’m out of my chair and looking behind me, she’s standing there in her jumpsuit, her hand wrapped around her stomach. I can feel the wave of relief hit me like a tsunami, and then I give her a smile. “Kid.”
“John,” she says as she takes a step my way. Her legs are weak, and she has to brace herself against the wall, but she manages to get closer. “How long was I out?”
“Been more than a week. You came in looking worse for wear. I lost all connection with your armor after you fired off every missile in the arsenal.”
“I forgot about that.”
“Forgot about leveling every building for ten city blocks? That’s impressive, even by your standards.” She rubs at her forehead and closes her eyes, like she’s concentrating real hard. “Do you remember how you got here? What happened? All I saw was you fly in with a hole the size of a small child torn right through your guts.”
“Yousef happened. After the fight at the Panzer, I went to Central. He fig
ured out where I was, and we got into it. Obviously, I lost the fight.”
“He’s that good, huh?”
“He’s faster than anyone I’ve ever fought.” She looks past me, to the half circle monitoring station where I do all my work. Hanging above it are all the holographic monitors we use to keep track of the station and the outside, except I’ve got all of our cameras focused on what’s happening in the Deadlands at that moment. “Let’s talk about something else for a second. We’ll have too much time to game plan for Yousef later.”
“It’s your call. You’re in charge here, you know. Whole place was made just for you.”
“It was made for whoever wore the suit. And don’t talk like you don’t run thing around here, John.”
“I just keep the lights on.”
Jackie’s throws one of those shining smiles of hers my way before she walks up to the screen. “How are things in the detention center?”
“Same old, same old.”
“Everyone being fed?”
“You might be out of weapons, but we’ve got enough food to last until the next apocalypse.”
“Let’s go check on them. It’s been a while.”
“Like I said. Your call.”
She nods and leads the way out, still taking slow steps at first before she finally gets some of her strength back. The poor girl’s still looking a little sluggish as we make our way down the hall, but I can tell she’s getting a little stronger with every step. Still, she reaches out, and I gladly give her an arm to help her walk. She wraps our arms tight together and leans on me as we work our way to the elevator, riding it down into the bowels of the station.
When we hit the bottom floor, the doors slide open, and one light after another turns on with a thump, lighting the way forward between square cells that stretch out into the darkness of the mountain. Each cell’s box shaped, not very large but glowing on every side with an energy field meant to keep the perps inside. Entire place was designed as part of the station’s original design, as a place to hold terrorists operating in the old country. Jackie’s turned the whole operation into a prison for every raider she ever managed to take alive, which was a lot. The kid went out of her way, on more than one occasion I might add, to not kill them and lock them away instead. She did that knowing it’d mean she’d have to take a few more bullets to the chest than she’d have liked.
“Everything looks good,” she says as we’re walking between the cells. Inside, we can see the raiders glaring at us, some of them screaming. Most just look away, but they have to know it was either this or be killed. Jackie saved as many of them as was possible. “We haven’t had any trouble in the cells? No repairs that would have been risky?”
“Risky? You honestly think any one of these punks would have been able to put up a fight against me?”
“I guess not,” she laughs. “You’re kind of a strong guy, John.”
“I may be able to crush a steel bar in my hands, but you’re the one who can lift a tank.”
“Not in my current condition.”
“You’ll get it back. You always do. I managed to get that virus out of your system, so you should be back to normal in no time.”
“The Dragyn worked?”
“Like a charm.”
“I see you’ve got your Medical Mechanic face on.”
“Sort of had to with you bleeding all over my medical bay floor.”
“It was that bad, huh?”
“You came crashing in here on your suit’s autopilot and looked like you’d been bled dry. It was pretty touch and go there for a while.”
Jackie takes a deep breath as we turn a corner, swinging back the way we came. Some of the raiders spot us and ignore us, looking at their tablets instead and watching any one of the movies in the mountain’s database. She looks at one, then another, staying quiet for a second before saying, “Yousef was planning all along to use me to get to his sister.”
“And with her out of the way, there’s no one to keep the raiders together, which means Yousef’s going to rain holy hell down on the Deadlands.”
“She was the one unlocking all the old military tech and teaching the raiders military tactics. If we want to battle back against Fort Silence, we’re going to need to get them on our side.” Jackie waves at the prison cells. “After everything I’ve done to them, is that even possible?”
“War’s war, kid. You never know. If it turned out you’d saved as many of them as you could, fed them, kept them safe, then you may get a few of them to listen to. You don’t exactly come off as the killing machine some people think you are.”
“So, I go to them and let them know we’ve got a bigger problem to deal with, then I use the prison here to prove that I’ve always tried to do what I thought was right. That I didn’t ever just want them dead. Not like Yousef.”
I pat her hand and feel her fingers wrap around mine. Funny thing, the sense of touch, and how much more important it’s become since Jackie showed her face. “Seems like you’ve already got a plan going.”
She pauses as we stand at the elevator for a second. “I do, but we need to get some things nailed down first. I need all the records we have about the Advanced Reaction Core system. There’s got to be something about it in the old Apeiron files. I’m also going to need the lab. I want all of the backup lines of my Creep cells we’ve got in storage.”
“Getting back to the old science habit, I see.”
“Got to make mom and dad proud somehow.”
Erin’s Recording 02
It’s been more than a week since the showdown at the Panzer. Shamed to say it, but I spent more than my fair share of that time at the bottom of a bottle. Fortunately, I had good people who were willing to pick up the slack. After a few days, once I came out of my stupor, I realized we hadn’t had an old fashioned tribute to Tara. A wake. Maybe because I refused to believe she was dead.
Which is a funny thing, because the day I was finally coming out of the bottle was the day one of the men exploded into my quarters, looking like he’d seen a ghost. He looks at me like a crazed man and shouts, “Sir!” The fellow’s loud enough to burst my eardrums. “We’re getting a message from the Panzer.”
“What’s that now?”
“There’s a message coming in from the Panzer, addressed for you.”
“I’ll take it on my tablet,” I shout back, grabbing the device off my desk while he vanishes out of the room. In a second, I’ve got a video signal lighting up the screen, and I almost laugh out loud when I see her face. “Tara! Tara, I thought you were dead.” She looks worse for wear, her face all bloodied and her skin pulling tight against her bones. Still, it’s hard not to look at what shocking white hair of hers and feel the fire in my soul lighting up. “I thought for sure you were dead. Creep around the Panzer’s been too thick for us to get through, but I was planning to send someone to look for you the moment it cleared. I’m being honest, I—”
“Erin, if you’re receiving this,” her voice begins, and I suddenly feel the flush of joy emptying back out of me. “Then I need you to know something before I die.”
“A recording.” The realization douses that fire I’d felt. All of one moment of joy, only for it to be crushed beneath reality’s boot. I toss myself back in my chair and mumble, “Well, let’s hear it then.”
“You probably know that Ishara is dead. And, you know what that means for me.”
“That you died, too.”
“That I’m not going to last much longer. But, I wanted you to know how much I appreciate you. How much you meant to me and Ishara. And, now that we’ll be gone, it’s up to you to lead the Sha’b.”
“I can’t, Tara. Wasn’t a time I was cut out to lead so many. How could you ask such a—”
“I also want you to know that Ishara put in a backup plan in case something like this happened. A lockout system meant to prevent anyone from using the Panzer except for someone with the right password. You’ll know what it is when the time’s right.
” She tries to take a deep breath, but it’s shallow, and she looks like she’s hurting as she tries to take in any air she can. “Get the Panzer online and destroy Yousef. Our mission is in your hands now.”
“Tara.”
“Erin, believe in yourself like me and Ishara believed in you.” She takes one last, pained breath as she closes her eyes. “Goodbye.”
And then it’s just me, my eyes staring at the screen for a long moment before looking over at the bottle on my table. The God’s honest truth is that I’d rather just drink the pain away, but I sit there and reconsider. Creep’s still too thick around the Panzer for us to reclaim it, so that only leaves us with one another thing to do. Hold that wake. “Alright then, Erin,” I tell myself. “Let’s think this through. A wake in one more week, maybe two, once I’ve had the time to put together something truly special. Something that Tara and Ishara deserve. In the meantime, I’ll ask around with the clans. See who wants to lead a mission into that deathtrap around the Panzer. How hard could it be to get volunteers?”
Last Testament of Ishara Suliman 02
My brother was born with the worst impulses of my father. Competitive. Prideful. These qualities are not, of themselves, condemnable. Prideful men and women still learn to temper their pride into a confidence they wield for the sake of others. Competition drives mankind to achieving the incredible. However, when divorced from compassion and justice, a person’s pride and aggression form a destructive rot in their very soul.
Still, my mother tempered Yousef’s worst impulses, for a time. She taught him about art, music, and the culture of the Old World. In the arts, she showed him the joy of enjoying beauty for its own sake. She taught him the value of a single human life. Much like she had done to my father, she showed Yousef that fighting and violence were not the only paths in life. And so, my brother followed my mother’s guidance and became an actor. Fort Silence had grown more and more relaxed even from the first days when my father had declared its independence. It had grown less authoritarian, less like a police state, and more democratic. It became more open to the personal freedoms of the individual. In that space, there was room for the theatre once more, for music and the arts.