Raiders (31 page)

The Great Elder raised his right hand and made a circle and then a cross with his left in mid-air. He nodded and the two Temple Guards who flanked them shot at the two who stood at the head of the lost and shambled line, a man and a woman both. They fell into each other with a resigned
thwump
as the Coilrounds transversed their skulls.

“I said drop your weapons! Now!” Someone yelled while hundreds of rifles aimed at the Elder and his assemblage. They ignored the calls, dragged the bodies to the side and three more Raiders stepped forward and stood before the Elder. Another circle waved with the right, a cross with the left and they too fell dead in the same fashion.

Those who stayed behind in the Level Seven mega-cavern looked through the barrier glass, mouths open and in an evident state of sheer disbelief.

And then someone shot the farthest of the Temple Guards. He fell onto the barrier glass to his right and slowly slid down its impervious surface. “God damn it people! Hold your fire!” the Sergeant yelled.

The other Temple Guard turned her head to observe the hundreds of barrels and lights trained upon her and the other Raiders. She dropped her Coilgun onto the floor, produced an old world handgun from somewhere inside her silk and leather straps, pushed the iron thing against the soft underside of her jaw, and expressed the trigger down.

Not a single Raider held any kind of weapon in their hands. They simply waited for their Elder’s blessing and then they would leave this stormblown, crippled world behind them forever. But now even that would be impossible as the Temple Guards lay inanimate at the feet of their Great Elder and his two Chosen women.

A Raider stepped out from the line, his face painted over in lines of shock and despair. He said aloud, “My chosen, my chosen! You have fallen! Why are you with them? Betray us?” He scowled in Mandarin as he looked to Kama. She stood at the front of the soldiers’ line, about fifteen meters away.

Kama responded to the Raider who had patiently waited for his death mere moments ago. She said, as tears welled up in his eyes even before she spoke, “My song.” she lowered her head, looked at her feet then raised it once more. “My song, I am not with them.” She waved her hand side to side to the Polar City soldiers. “They,
they,
my dear song,
are with me.
”

The Great Elder slowly walked from his station and into the empty space between the Raiders and the Polar City soldiers. He turned and faced his people as beams of light from rifle stocks shined toward him, raised his hands and flicked them to signal that his followers should also do the same. Some of the Raiders followed his suggestion while the rest simply sat in their places and lowered their faces. The Polar City soldiers cautiously stepped forward. A loud alarm sounded off. The glass barrier lit up while hundreds of lasers illuminated themselves around its perimeter line. It slowly lifted up and away with a stone-ground rub, two centimeters a second.

Kama, Julian and Aurelia checked into a hastily deployed medical treatment bay that was set up on Level One. Julian had sustained a laceration to his left lower leg that he never noticed in the heat of combat. He was stitched up and sprayed with silvergel and then dressed with a wraparound gauze. Kama was more dehydrated than she had realized. She drank three hand bottles of juice laced with various electrolytes.

They stopped over to Kama’s living Pod and rested for a short while. Raiders had tossed her personal belongings everywhere and most of the furnishings were either overturned, moved or used as fodder for barriers somewhere in the street outside. Aurelia fell asleep on Kama’s main-room floor from utter exhaustion. Julian couldn’t sleep however, so he lay next to her for a little while.

“Where you goin’?” Julian asked Kama when she emerged from her bedroom. She had changed into civilian clothes. They were a utilitarian cut, leather and denim and unadorned with anything.

Kama shook her head. “You really have to ask?” she said and placed her hands on her hips.

“Right,” Julian said. He stroked Aurelia’s hair even though she was fast asleep. “He’s fine. I’m sure of it,” he said.

“Try not to mess up the place,” Kama said and then laughed as she looked around at her Pod. The place had looked like some mythic giant had picked her little Pod house right on up from it’s foundation ties and shook it around in its hands, like a toy snowglobe.

“Yeah, we’ll be careful,” Julian said and laughed with her. “Go,” he said as he waved his hand toward the door.

Kama walked to Gate One, the Polar City’s main entrance. There were soldiers and civilians everywhere. The trip took longer than usual since there were so many bodies and debris all about the streets. The Storm had blown in a good pile of debris. There were tree branches from liberated blindscrubs that appeared to have been stabbed into the walls of the City, even two hundred meters inside. Outside there were only a few smaller trees that miraculously stood intact. Everything was a mess, even the Wall. The outer roads were virtually impassable by any vehicle save perhaps a Solarcycle. There were plenty of dead animals and birds as well. The affair was depressing to observe in its grand scale, Kama thought.

She stumbled her way across the wreckage and made her way back to where the camp once stood. It was easy enough to find since the great Airships had descended back down to their original location. The camp was gone, buried in newly tossed rocks and trees and mud from the Storm. There were about twenty people who cut and dug away at the wrecked pileup. “Got one!” A rescuer yelled out as she shut off her lasing saw and grunted a tree trunk section from its nest. It rolled down the pile and thwunked itself to rest on the ground. She brushed the dirt from a survival pod which was not much more than a metal shell anchored to the ground with an impressively robust cable chain.

A woman emerged from the survival pod, bruised and evidently rattled from laying inside the thing in two hundred and fifty mile an hour winds. The lid revealed that it was heavily padded on its inner surface but even the cushions were no match for the deadly forces that the Storm pushed in. She staggered up to stand, her knees slightly bent and hands poised out from her body. “You okay?” The rescuer asked as she picked her up bodily and carried her down.

Kama shuffled through the mess as rescuers liberated one survival pod after another. Amazingly all their anchors held. They somehow drove spikes far enough into the soil and rock to lash them to the earth. She guessed that they must have somehow sent the pods from Level Seven down the mountainside and into the camp.

And then she saw Dusty. He sprang out from his metal pod with a cartoonish anima with nobody in his immediate proximity to help him. “Woo hoo! Holy shit that was awesome!” He yelled out to nobody in particular as if he had just ridden the latest roller coaster ride in some ancient and lost amusement park from long ago.

“Hey!” Kama vigorously waved her hands to Dusty who was about fifty meters away. He waved back and slowly descended the rubble-strewn pile. They hugged and kissed despite their shared exhaustion in the face of it all. “Here, you’re bleeding,” she said as she cupped the back of his head. “Hold still.” She ripped a piece of her undershirt and wrapped it around her right hand then pushed it to a cradle.

“Thanks! Yow! Hell you missed a hell of a ride ya know!” Dusty smiled, his face and neck bruised and scraped everywhere. “I felt like someone pushed me down the side of a mountain in that thing!” He paused while she held the bloodflow down. “You okay baby?” he asked. “What happened to you in there? Did they hit you?”

“No, I’m fine. Just try and hold still.” They shambled back to the Polar City gate. When they finally made it back to Kama’s pod, the two slept for almost an entire day.

Four months passed. Polar City Three crawled its way back to a fair degree of normality but it would never be the same again. They removed the fallen and performed final burial ceremonies for the families of the lost.

As for the remnant of the Jia Ting clan, the City governors decided to keep them both in the Level Seven keep but for the Raider leaders including what remained of the Elders, the Chosen women and Temple officers, they were kept inside the Military Centre away from the others.

They discovered the cubes that once held Venusia and her twin sister Veliosa. The Raiders had drained their growing gel matricies. All that was left were two empty transparent cube shaped tanks, blue-green gel and fibers that spread across the black glass floor.

For Greater Assistants could only be grown, not programmed much less synthesized. They slowly branched their pseudo-nerves out one microscopic thread at a time, the hairs fingered in all directions from the gel matrix center.

Veliosa took seventy-three years to grow before she was even able to formulate her first word, which was, incidentally,
plus
. Her sister took seventy-eight years to do the same. Unlike a body-worn Personal Assistant, it was simply impossible to copy a Greater Assistants’ three dimensional matrix and store them somehow. They could only protect access but that was really all. The Raiders undoubtedly figured out that it was they who drove the last Gantry gun. So they ruined the twin girls into nirvana, forever, simply by shooting their tanks somewhere near their bottom.

General Berg and Christie both deduced that the Raiders did not actually fall back or retreat, but instead they had attempted to regroup back at Gate Six to give them a little space between Christie’s front and themselves. They hadn’t counted on running smack into Berg’s second offensive from the northern entrance, so when they did the Raiders realized that they were trapped, outnumbered and outgunned even with their incredible technology in hand. So they went in the only direction that they could and that was down the Bigstairs.

The great Airships flew at regular intervals between Polar City Six and home. They brought workers and fresh engineers and supplies and especially tools to help them rebuild and repair much of the broken City. Bjørg even offered to ship over professional social councilors who would help the survivors deal with their post traumatic stress. As for General Berg, he would fly the Airships back and forth with Bjørg between their two cities more often than not. Sometimes they would land in the wildlands when the weather cooperated, just the two of them.

The Military Intelligence never figured out how the Raiders bypassed the Centre’s security so easily. It remains a mystery, even now.

Kama, Dusty, Aurelia, Julian, Mirabella, Calliope and even Ryan grew ever closer together as friends in the wake of the events they went through. The days passed and word spread around the City that Reso was eventually buried in the newborn sands, just as the weathermen predicted. All that remained of the once great culture of the Jia Ting, the descendants who were prophesied to be future progenitors of all humankind, genetically select supermen and women both presently resided inside the confines of Level Seven. They were supplied with whatever they needed but the Raiders were prisoners nonetheless. Still, it was more humane than sending them out into the Wastes once more, where they would have inevitably died away.

The seven friends collected themselves together to go out. They heard that Club Fire was open for business again. But first, a stop along the way. They walked up to the cook at the old stir fry stand, outside the Military Center. He looked at them wide-eyed, presumably not used to such a large number of customers all at once. The cook nodded at the seven, smiled and then pushed a few tablespoons of sesame oil from a bottle onto the hot wok. The oil smoked and a grain of rice crackled away from the carbon steel surface in rebellion.

Kama watched the old man happily work and it made her feel like nothing had ever happened, as if crisis and death never fell down around them only months before, and that it was just another day. The cook looked straight at Kama, straight in and said, “What you want?”

She smiled, and then made her decision.

THE END