Rebellion (Rebel Wars Book 1) Page 2
She uttered her friend’s name as she struggled to stand. The massive pillar of strength before her stood up, apparently as invincible as he wanted others to believe. Cal’s armor dropped in parts off his body and revealed the muscled flesh below, scarred and burnt. Dropping now from the bowels of the transport ship were “men” as tall as Cal, five pairs of boots dug into the earth. Their armor was the counter to Cal’s, deep-blue and ominous. They weren’t as broad as him, but they were definitely as tall. These were not humans, these were Corporation soldiers. Corporation soldiers wore nothing to cover their odd faces. Human-like, but bulging and strained like there was too much underneath their faces. They were haunting and imposing, but not too alien to look upon. She brought herself up to her knees and rested a moment unsure where to find the strength to stand. Her apparatus buzzed as several of the emitters were damaged and unusable, the motors still hummed to assist her commands. A blessing was given as the Anthem stopped, the horribly cheerful music ceasing its command of the air. One of the men stepped forward, brandishing a hand filled with emitters like Alice’s.
“Commander Gray-Son of the Fourth Insurgent Battalion. I hereby claim this Colony for the Corporation. You will surrender all assets and people for our use, and we will cease execution. Do you accept our terms?” His emitter shined a deadly azure glow as he leveled it at Cal’s face. He had assumed the Stormbreaker was in charge, a fair mistake to make. Cal wouldn’t have to worry about the emitter if it wasn’t for his armor breaking, his suit had been designed to counteract their technological advances. In the rebel ranks they were known as Paladins, but to the Corporation they were thieves. A general of another Corporation army had coined the term saying only “they steal away any advantage you could hope to have.” They were a direct counter to flight, beam weapons, ground forces, and even aerial advantages. The bomb suddenly made sense, they didn’t fear Alice; they feared Cal.
“You’ve caught me with’at my armor. Hardly a fair fight.” Cal grunted as he swiftly moved a box-like object from his back and hit the switch. The box was an upgraded version of a standard slug weapon. He couldn’t be bothered with emitters all over his body as his armor took their place so instead, he used the highest form of slug weaponry for ranged attacks. The box let loose over a thousand rounds, electromagnetically propelled projectiles moving so fast they could penetrate most armors instantly. There was barely a sound as the weapon fired and was immediately rendered useless by an invisible barrier surrounding Gray-Son. Like flies against glass, they ricocheted off pointlessly and spat into the dirt. The emitter flashed an eerie blue and the shot was off before Cal could even speak. The bolt melted flesh and armor alike, and the titan dropped to the ground. Alice shouted as Cal’s devilish smile flashed into her mind one last time. Standing tall she unleashed a volley of beam fire, this time the barrier had been dropped. The bolts were off their targets, the emitters she thought she was using having been destroyed by the bomb.
A few of the bolts struck home, hitting two of the five men standing before Cal’s lifeless body and knocking them to the ground. Gray-Son shook his head and counter-fired against her. Servo-motors kicked in and launched her forward away from the shots, kicking off the ground to gain an aerial advantage. One of the men dodged her shots easily and brought out a buffet of his own. A myriad shots sprayed the air as Gray-Son took a step back, the onslaught piercing her remaining armor and creating agonizing waves through her nervous system. She landed harshly against the unforgiving dirt and remained still. She tried to mentally assess the damage in her mind, her knees unresponsive to her desperate commands to stand. She felt grim remorse creep into her chest as a hand gripped her hair and pulled her up from the ground.
Standing over eight feet tall, the Commander Gray-Son held her aloft like a toy. She took some satisfaction in the fact that three of his men now laid with their backs on the ground. She hadn’t missed entirely it seemed. He tossed her over to the remaining man, who held her up to look Gray-Son in the face. She wanted to speak but wasn’t sure she could.
“Surrender wasn’t any easier. We’d have probably had to kill the Paladin anyways. Too dangerous a lot to let live. In all of the conquests, the Corporation has taken a part in, records show that the Paladins of Earth have given us the most trouble. I see you are partial to our apparatus gear. A woman after my own heart. Yours isn’t nearly as efficient as ours, but definitely well made. When we’re done here, you’ll have to tell me who forged it for you.” Gray-Son’s voice was deep without a mocking tone, though she had expected him to gloat. He wasn’t, he was speaking like he had just ordered a meal and they had gotten it wrong. She could handle gloating, she couldn’t handle scolding. They referred to the rebels as the “Children” quite frequently, and it was clear that he held the same contempt for them.
“Why…why were you loading my people up?” Alice managed through the pain that was rocking her stomach into nausea.
“We were taking our assets. This colony has no real meaning to us when the Calamity comes. It will be amongst the first destroyed in the initial event. There’s a reason we let you keep command here for so long. Did you really think we hadn’t noticed in a decade of insurgency that this colony was resisting? We appreciate the faux donations to our cause, but we never counted anything from this colony as crucial until now. You’ve hardened your people here, made them resistant to everything that comes their way. This is a quality we cannot fabricate on our own, so we let you raise as many rebellious children as you wanted. Now we have the beginnings of a good little regiment for ourselves.” Gray-Son looked her square in the eyes as he was talking. He wanted to see the tears well up as she realized what she had done. Tears came to her eyes, tears of guilt and rage. They had been playing a game the entire time, they had spent disposable resources to create conflict for her colony. They had never intended to take the colony from her before, they had been feeding and growing them like a crop.
A crowd had formed as the people of the colony surrendered and surrounded Alice. They looked with intense fear and despair at Cal’s broken body. Only, it wasn’t fear. As Alice studied their faces she realized this was defiance, fists had tightened. Even now they had prepared to fight to free her, she could see now that they hadn’t grabbed belongings to be ushered away, but rudimentary weapons. Farming supplies, welding units, and harvesters were being brandished as fighting tools. Gray-Son must have realized this, but it was a bit too late as an arc of plasma from a long-range spot welder sprayed across his exposed face. He yelled in pain, the man holding Alice releasing her to raise his emitters.
Beams of light exposed flesh and nerve to pain as the man attempted to knock down the civilians. A young man screamed in pain as his healthy limbs were reduced to stumps in a blink of an eye. That scream created heartbreaking rage as a water harvester was plunged into the back of the Corporation soldier and activated. Breath wouldn’t arrive in his lungs as they filled with water, farming implements drawing blood as they hacked at his armor and skin. In a moment, he was dragged to the ground; a threat no more. Alice crawled to Cal’s corpse and grabbed a small device that was attached to his wrist, the tears falling freely from her eyes. Maybe if things had been different, she could have been happy and they could have been happier together. That was gone now.
Alice looked for Gray-Son and spotted his scarred face as he kicked a civilian to the ground. She spotted mechanisms on his feet and saw blood fall from the man he’d attacked. That kick probably had the force of a tractor behind it. Gray-Son leapt off the ground, the moment she’d waited for. A volley of light escaped him, more casualties that Alice would avenge. The device she’d taken from Cal escaped her grip and snaked outwards to Gray-Son’s boots.
“Take away your advantage.” She laughed grimly. The device wrapped around his leg and solidified into a compound far denser and heavier than the leap from his mechanisms could handle. He fell face first, spitting beams of light into the ground like a raging meteorite. Alice was on her feet, adrenaline carrying her
farther than she ever thought she’d be able to make it. Dropping down to her knees in front of Gray-Son she grinned through blood-stained teeth.
“Opposition didn’t make us ready to be your weapons, it made us strong enough to beat you.” She wasn’t taking the high-road by gloating against him now, his mangled face managing a bare snarl. Before he could speak, her emitter flashed a bolt of crimson light and finished her speech in a rousing conclusion.
It would be days before Alice was up and able to move. She didn’t have the quickened pace of healing that the Corporate soldiers had, but she had a strength of will that seemed to outweigh that. She surveyed the crops quickly, the surviving civilians glad to have the distraction from their grief. Alice would never truly get over the losses they suffered, yet the choice wasn’t truly hers to make. She had to keep everything moving, every gear in the clock turning. The transport ship above them was surprisingly nearly empty of personnel. The survivors that remained were quickly dispatched or, if human, recruited to rejoin their rebellion. Some of them still claimed fears of the upcoming “Calamity”, and something inside Alice told her that it could be true
She woke up in terror throughout the nights to come. She never spoke of her nightmares to any of her men, instructing herself to keep personal feelings out of work. The transport ship had a nice inventory of weapons and other supplies, and a few of the civilians were brave enough to begin training to fight. More importantly, the transport ship was going to offer her a way out of this. A couple of her scientists had been able to decrypt some of the communication logs, not much intel but enough to give her a timeline. It seemed that they were always going to let her colony be destroyed by the so-called Calamity, so she had a few months to prepare her crew for evacuation. Her people would ask her if she believed it, and her response was always “no.” If they asked her why they were preparing to leave before the Calamity was scheduled to happen, she’d always dismiss it as coincidence.
“I hate you, Cal.” She said over his gravestone. “Why’d you have to leave me now? When everything we believed is being challenged?” Her knees still gave her trouble while she kneeled before his stone, and she imagined they always would. A single tear slid down her face as she looked up into the simulated night sky. Even if the universe wasn’t ending, there wasn’t much left on this rock anymore. She stood up, dropped a cracked emitter on the grave and slowly made her way back to the compound. The storm had broken for now, but she knew it would never truly end.
Chapter 2
Alice’s tech team of engineers consisted of three intelligent and disciplined women. The word discipline applying only if one assumed a dedication to high-energy snacks and profanity fit the bill. The sound of electrical currents being tested and the vibrations of emitters filled the small room they had set up as their temporary laboratory. Running through the scavenged armors and weapons of their former attackers, the three women smiled as the results gained satisfactory conclusions.
“What in the hell do you think Alice will do with this abomination?” Milly said to her sisters.
“What anyone does with apparatus? They wear them you rambling moron.” Lisa said.
“Yeah, but I mean. Do you really think she’ll wear this? I’ve never seen anything like it and I doubt those corporation goons have either.” Milly stated.
“Look Milly, I love you and all. But don’t you think that’s kind of the goddamned point? To bring the fight to those bastards in such a way they’ll think twice before messing with the boss?”
“Probably, but I just don’t know if it’ll work. The armor is heavier now, there are fewer emitters and the servos have been amped up to compensate for that bum knee. If you ask me, I think she just wants to be all robot.”
“Enough. The boss has enough on her mind, and we have a demonstration to get to. Let’s wrap it up ladies.” Andreya said, breaking her prolonged silence.
Milly wasn’t far from the truth. The apparatus that laid before them on the table looked nothing like the elegant weapon they had taken off of her damaged body. Ike a lining of aluminum foil it had kept her together but only just. The fractures on her bones, the hemorrhaging from the wounds, combined with the burns from the explosion had done some incredible work on her health. Andreya had been the first one with medical training to help her out of the suit and try to keep her alive. Once the adrenaline had gone down, much like a drunk losing his buzz, Alice had lost full control of herself. Their glorious leader had managed to save the day with Cal’s weapon, but at what cost?
Lisa’s golden hair was pulled back in a tight bun to prevent herself from ruining her luscious locks with a misplaced welder beam or whatever else her sister Milly might do to accidentally hurt one of them. Milly was a beautiful young woman but was unfortunately and perpetually bald as the result of one of her little accidents. A sweet and charming kitten with a brilliant mind and a clumsy set of fingers and luck. It was truly a wonder that some jury-rigged device of hers hadn’t gone bonkers and annihilated one unfortunate branch of the Tillman Sister’s family tree. A small smile crept on Lisa’s face as she watched Milly carefully attaching a set of wires to the new transmitter array. She had always been impressed at her younger sister’s ability to work with wires and logical transmitters in the fashion that she did like it was as simple as cooking a grilled cheese. The latter was something Milly could not accomplish, her walking irony was not lost on others.
Lisa flipped a switch and pulled up the digital keyboard, hitting keys with accuracy that would make even the most veteran sniper jealous. Every keystroke was just a piece of her genius leaking forward, creating a complicated program that would take a team of programmers a day to do in unity. She would have it done in the time it took to cook (or in Milly’s case burn and have cause for the fire team to show up) the aforementioned grilled cheese. Her brows furrowed as she cast a sideways glance at her older sister.
“Andreya, do you have your end done yet? This is going to get messy if you don’t.” She said.
“Calm down. I was finished before you even started.” Andreya’s voice as emotionless as a lion consuming its prey. No matter how intelligent the other sisters were, they could never even touch the surface of Andreya’s calculating mind. Her mind was a predator and any sort of logic or mathematical problem was the prey. She could speak 38 languages (teaching herself after first converting them to mathematical formulas) and there wasn’t a possible programming language she couldn’t learn. This was her world, everyone else just showed up for drama.
Without a doubt, some of the top talent in the entire known Rebellion and Corporation fleets was within that room. Even more so now that they had accessed all of the data files on the transport ship where their lab had been relocated. The townsfolk had watched as bright luminescence radiated from the hull during the night, causing the children to cry out in fear. Whatever horrors of science the three had been committing upon the craft was soon to be unleashed onto the Corporation forces. The man who had become known as “Hero” after he plunged a hydrating tool into the spine of a Corporation good looked up from his bowl of meat and rice and let out a hearty laugh.
“I think I know now what they feared so much. This must be that Calamity they’re always preaching about.” He turned back to his food as the others guffawed and exploded with laughter. It had not really been that funny, but something about death appearing in your simple life often made jokes funnier. It certainly made Hero’s food taste a lot better, he was certain he’d never tasted anything quite as good as the fresh beef bowl on his lap. He wasn’t certain he liked this new nickname, but it had gotten him attention from Alice and a new position. He was respected, and respect was all that he’d ever really wanted. It hadn’t occurred to him that his joke about the Calamity the Corporation feared might actually have been factual. Why would it?
Chapter 3
Alice grunted from the pain of her torn muscles, the new apparatus would assist her physical therapy and fight the pain; but she’d have to
get it on first. Every layer of clothing she put on seemed to hurt more than the last. The transport ship was being geared for lift off in two days and she had a lot of work to accomplish in that short period of time. She had gathered a new supply of weapons and armor from the transport ship, learning new intel on the most efficient ways to utilize the equipment from the data banks. In a month’s time, she had run most of her family and crew through the training simulators provided and that would allow them a greater chance to survive what she had planned. 5% was always better than 1%.
She groaned and stood up, placing the last piece of armor-coating on her chest. She glanced in the mirror, she had lost so much weight from the mixture of pain medications and alcohol that she barely recognized herself. Her hair had started to pale from age, only she wasn’t old enough for that to happen. Something had snapped within her when Cal had died, something that cut deeper than even when her husband died. Her heart felt like a cold, iron lump in her chest and she wanted to rip it out and be done with it. It had betrayed her. She had promised herself to never develop romantic feelings again, but she couldn’t help it with Cal. They were friends but something about how he made her feel had made her believe that she could go home. Home was not a place, but a feeling of love in her heart that she had treasured for so long. The cruelty of that emitter blast took Cal away from her, and her desire to be human. Why would she want to be human if she couldn’t love? Isn’t that what they were better at than the maniacal creatures of the Corporation?
She couldn’t be bothered to look at the damned mirror anymore and pulled her coat around her shoulders. It wouldn’t be cold enough outside for her to have really needed it, but she felt better in its embrace. Alice walked with the menacing purpose of not a scorned woman, but a commander of a legion of demons about to go to war. In a matter of minutes she was standing on the testing floor the lab-mice Tillman sisters had created in the bay of the transport ship. In the time that had passed she had started with quiet precision at the tile floor and allowed her new apparatus to be poured over her. Like a doll being stitched up, she had immediately felt new life in her body.