Warden: A Novel (12 page)

“That was five hundred years ago, Barent. How can you be certain it’s still there?”

“The entrance is set far back between the rocks. If you didn’t already know it was there, you would
never
know it was there. But you’re right, I can’t be sure it still exists after all this time.”

“We don’t have much of a choice though, do we?” Tana said.

“Not really. But if it is still intact, it would be a perfect place to hole up and figure out what to do next.”

“How much longer until we reach it?”

“Maybe two more hours, if we can keep up the pace.”

“You will freeze to death in what you’re wearing, Barent. And to be honest, I don’t think I can make it. Actually…if I’m
really
being honest, I can’t make it.”

Barent smiled confidently and threw one of Tana’s arms over his neck. “Don’t worry about me. And I’ll drag you there if I have to. We’ll make it.”

Tana was too tired to argue and too frozen to resist, so she remained silent as Barent plowed ahead through the snow. She tried to lift her legs when she found the strength—doing everything she could to help him out and be less of a burden. But it was no use; Tana had nothing left. Her life was in Barent’s hands now, and this whole situation was well beyond her control. And if there was one thing Tana was loath to give away—to anyone—it was control of her own fate. As her eyes slid closed for the last time, Tana tried counting the footsteps as Barent pushed them onward.

She got to fifteen before she lost consciousness altogether.

Tana Neng woke up in a nice warm bed, and it was all of thirty seconds before she realized that she was completely naked.

“What the—!”

She sat up sharply and surveyed her surroundings, finding Barent seated at a small field-desk in one corner of the squarish room. They were in a decent-sized cave hewn out of solid rock, and the wide-open space was mostly empty—except for the bed Tana was sitting on, Barent’s desk, and a large pile of metal containers haphazardly pushed off to one side. The lid had been knocked off one of them and was lying on the ground next to it, and Tana could see weapons inside.

She noticed two wide lighting strips running across the ceiling, but they were ancient and barely worked. The majority of light was coming from a chem-log fireplace set into the wall across from her. Tana saw her clothing and Barent’s armor hanging on a makeshift clothesline in front of it.

“How do you feel,” Barent asked, not looking up from the desk.

“I’d feel a lot better if I had clothes on.”

“They’re still pretty soaked. You might want to give them a few more hours to dry.”

“You took my clothes off,” Tana stated simply.

“I did. I thought you would prefer that to hyperthermia.” Then Barent looked up and smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen a naked woman before.”

“I’m sure,” she replied. “But you haven’t seen
this
naked woman before.”

Barent looked back down and continued reading. “No, I haven’t. Nice tattoos, though.”

“Hey!”

Tana hopped off the bed and wrapped the sheet around herself, and then she walked over to the desk, noting the coldness of the stone beneath her bare feet.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Your book. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Why should I? Besides, you already know the words…
you
said them.”

Barent leaned back in his chair. “It’s hard to believe that someone actually wrote down all of my speeches—gathered up everything I’d ever written, and then took the time to compile and categorize everything into a book.”

Tana sat down on the desk. “Why are you so surprised? You had to know that you were doing something special at the time.”

“Not really,” he responded. “We were doing what needed to be done. What was right. Our focus was on survival, not posterity.”

“But your words still inspired people.”

Barent looked up from the desk and straight into Tana’s eyes. “What good did that do? My
words
have been around for half a millennium, and what good have they really done? From what you’ve told me Le’sant is an unjust mess—run by an oligarchy pretending to be a democracy. There’s no equality whatsoever, and children go hungry in the streets.” The anger in Barent’s voice subsided and he sighed. “The prisoners ended up being no better than their jailers.”

Tana looked off to the side, absorbing his words, and then Barent pushed the book away and leaned forward, clasping his hands together on the desk. “The Pardon War was a failure, Tana. And it didn’t achieve anything that I’d hoped. You all must have been pretty desperate to make
me
a hero.”

“Then why didn’t you just surrender back in the city?” Tana snapped. “Why not just give yourself up if it’s so damn hopeless?” She gestured around the room. “Why are we even here?”

“We are
here
to devise a plan to make things right…to do better this time. I’m not sure how yet, but I am going to fix this. And besides, leaving the city takes pressure off of everyone else right now. Once the Collective confirms that I’m gone with their DNA scanners they’ll leave the people alone. Hell, if we’re really lucky, they might even think we’re dead.”

“That’s not that big a stretch,” Tana said.

Barent grinned. “I’ve been in situations a lot worse than this.”

Tana returned his look with a grin of her own. “So have I. You heard the downtrodden as we were leaving the city, Barent. Did you hear the hope in their voices?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And what? Certainly you don’t think I can build an army out of those poor souls?”

“Of course not. But you have to start somewhere. And they wouldn’t be the only ones to rally around the Great Betrayer, you have the Wardens as well.”

“Yes,” Barent replied. “I do have the Wardens. I need to think this all through…”

Barent’s voiced trailed off as he became lost in his thoughts, so Tana hopped off the desk and went over to check on her clothing—soaking in the heat from the fire as she drew closer to it. Tana couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so warm.

“By the way,” Barent called out from behind her. “I liked the dagger the best.”

Tana spun back around. “What dagger?”

“You know, the one you have tattooed underneath your—”

“Don’t make me use a real one on you, Barent,” she threatened, and then Tana turned back toward the fire.

Neither one of them knew it.

But they were both smiling.

Sergeant Barent sat up in the bed and rubbed his eyes. A rush of confusion overwhelmed him as he struggled to remember where he was…
when
he was. And then it all came flooding back to him, and it was a testament to Barent’s resilience that this new reality hadn’t driven him mad.

Five hundred years.

He turned sideways and slid his feet down to the floor.

Barent looked around and spotted Tana searching through the pile of storage containers, but other than that, everything was exactly the same as when he’d drifted off to sleep. He remembered reading for a little while longer, and quizzing Tana about a few things regarding modern Le’sant—specifically, information about the Collective military. But then Barent couldn’t ignore his fatigue any longer and was compelled to get some rest. Although he didn’t want to admit it, his experiences over the last few days—especially dragging Tana through the snow for two hours—had really worn him down.

“Find anything interesting?” he asked her.

“Lots,” Tana replied. “I just have no idea what any of it is.”

She held up a square box with shallow slots on all four sides. “Like this thing, for example.”

“That,” Barent said, “is a fusion-powered battery charger. With proper maintenance, they can last a hell of a long time before they’re completely drained. If you take a look behind the desk you’ll find another one just like it. I’m charging up some power units for my plasma rifle.”

“And these?” Tana said, holding up a small box with four foil-wrapped blocks inside it. They were thin, shiny rectangles.

“Grab all of those you can find,” he directed. “They’re energy and nutrition bars—full of protein and calories. Even after five centuries, they’ll still be good.”

“What were they for?” Tana asked.

“They were supplied to the guards,” Barent replied. “To make sure we stayed healthy enough to maintain order.”

Tana pulled one out to examine it and then she shook the box. “You had
these
while everyone else was starving?”

“Other than the few colonists, everyone else was a convict.”

“Yeah? Well I guess it’s easy to be a saint when your stomach is full.”

“That’s not fair,” Barent objected.

“No. It wasn’t.” Tana grinned. “But then, you did redeem yourself in the end.”

“Thanks. I think…”

Barent pulled his boots on and stood up, and then he strolled over by the fire to warm himself. Tana took a break from her search and plopped down onto one of the crates, leaning her back up against the stone wall and crossing her legs.

“Why did you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Come here. Become a guard…leave Earth.”

“I had my reasons.”

“That’s why I’m asking you. What were they?”

“Let’s just say that unless you’re an explorer, you don’t go out on an interstellar mission when things are good at home, and leave it at that.”

“Tell me what happened,” Tana pleaded. “What went so wrong on Earth that you came to this shithole?”

Barent didn’t answer her; he just stood in silence, staring at the fire.

“You aren’t the only one who can read people,” Tana said. “I know it had to be something really bad.”

Barent scoffed. “You don’t know anything.”

“Then tell me,” Tana said. “
Please
.”

Barent heard the compassion in her voice, and he realized Tana wasn’t trying to be invasive, she was merely curious. And who knew what these people understood about Earth—they’d been cut off for five hundred years.

I suppose
it wouldn’t hurt for her to know just how fucked up her ancestors on the home world were,
Barent thought to himself.
Why not?

He shrugged and took a deep breath.

“I was in the military long before I became a guard,” he began. “And I fought in three wars back on Earth…the last of which almost took out the entire planet.
That
was the one that scared everyone enough to start thinking seriously about colonizing other worlds. We’d had the technology to do it for years, just not the will. But Armageddon knocking on the door finally put those rockets in the air. Figuratively speaking, of course. They were constructed in orbit.”

Barent paused for a moment, remembering the wars. All of the battles…and the killing. So many people had died—all over the globe—that it defied explanation. Mere numbers and adjectives couldn’t possibly do the horror justice. In fact, Barent believed there was no meaningful way that kind of hell ever
could
be articulated. But even if the right words did exist, he would never say them. Those thoughts and memories needed to stay buried, not talked about. It was the only way he knew to keep going.

“The planet simply wasn’t big enough for everyone anymore,” Barent continued. “And in the never-ending race for more resources, the major countries finally grew tired of proxy wars and began gobbling up the smaller contested nations—including mine. For a time, the most powerful among them even had a tacit agreement: we won’t interfere as you absorb the smaller countries in your sphere of influence, as long as you extend that same courtesy to us. Alliances and borders shifted frequently over the course of two decades, and in three separate wars, I found myself in three different armies. But eventually the final lines were drawn, with only three superpowers remaining. There was no room left for expansion—no more agreements to hammer out. The next war would be the
last
war.”

“You’re telling me about Earth,” Tana said. “And why humans left the planet. But what about you, personally? Why were
you
on the
Le’sant?”

“Because I had nothing left,” Barent said sharply.

He turned to face her and Tana saw the fury in his eyes. She’d seen that kind of rage before; it was the look a man wore right before he killed. But there was something else there as well, she noted, the look of a man who had killed
too much
. Barent’s anger flashed away as quickly as it had arisen.

“I left because they died in that last war, because my entire family was dead. Everyone, except for me.”

“I’m sorry—” Tana started.

“Don’t!” Barent snapped, but then his voice softened. “That was five hundred years ago. The past is long gone. All that’s left now…is now.”

“If you say so, Barent.”

“I do. And besides, even if they’d lived and I remained behind, what do you think has become of Earth? If you haven’t heard anything from them in all this time those idiots must have finally wiped themselves out.”

Barent shook his head side-to-side. “But I suppose that was inevitable.”

He drifted off into silent contemplation, staring back at the fire again, so Tana decided to continue rummaging around in the crates to see what else she could find. She felt down inside the one she was seated on and pulled out another device, but unlike the others, this one was flashing. A bright blue light on the top of it was rapidly flicking on and off, and she held it out in front of her and called over to Barent.

“What about this thing?” Tana asked him.

“Wha—” Barent’s mind was still clouded by the past, but he turned his head to look at her.

“What does this one do?” she said.

“How the hell?” Barent exclaimed.

He rushed over to Tana’s side and snatched the device from her hands, punching a sequence of codes into the tiny keypad on the side of it. Barent stared at the light in anticipation as it flashed red twice, and then returned to the original blue pattern.

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

“Believe what?” Tana asked him. “What is that thing?”