Brigends (The Final War Series Book 1) (6 page)

Although the city leaned in support of the Global Alliance, there was no attempt by security patrols to intercept the boxy frigate or even challenge its passage as it negotiated the thicket of towers and crisscrossing air traffic.

On the outskirts of Brooklyn, the Bandit entered the South Side Docking Station, a port facility accommodating less than a dozen medium class airships. Tucked out of the way and discreet in its business affairs, it was idyllic for hiding the ship of the world’s most wanted brigend.

At the far end of a long row of moored vessels, large pads rose off the platform of Dock Number 5 to meet the Bandit’s under-hull. Four mooring clamps locked the ship in place while a gangplank extended from the main walkway in individual sections, forming a narrow connection at full extension.

Inside the starboard airlock, Emil waited for the plank to lockdown. Garbed in chafed syntho-leather boots, tough jeans, and a syntho-hide jacket, he wasn’t recognizable as a fugitive. After a quick check of his K-25 pistol, he tucked it in his belt so it rested against his lower back. As for any suspicion by the locals, he was just another airman in port looking for a goodtime.

Minsk depressurized the compartment. A hissing indicated ambient pressure. He turned the release handle and opened the hatch. The unpleasant stench of the city’s bowels bombarded both men.

“Foul country,” he commented.

“It wasn’t always like this,” Emil seemed compelled to add.

The Russian frowned.

“Chief, keep an eye on Adi while I’m gone. I don’t —”

“You don’t what, sir?” She walked in, outfitted in a style like Emil’s.

“I was saying I don’t want you to get in to any trouble while I’m gone.” He tugged on her unfastened lapel. “Going somewhere, Commander?”

“Yeah, with you.”

“Not this time. I want you to stay with the ship.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Those are pretty much the same thing when it comes to me, Haiduc. The last time I let you go off alone, you were arrested.”

It was futile to argue; she was a persistent bug and wouldn’t have listened to him anyway. Giving how he wasn’t exactly acting like himself, there wasn’t a chance she would let him go out alone.

“Fine, have it your way, you stubborn girl.” He turned to Minsk. “It looks like the boat is yours.”

Emil and Adi raised their hoods. Once they disembarked from the ship and were down the gangplank, Minsk sealed the hatch closed.

They made it to the station’s fence with no problem. She paused to stare back at the ramshackle vessel.

“Hey,” he elbowed. “Stop that or you’ll jinx us.”

She made sure to stay close to his flank as they walked out the gate. She had been in many ghettos before, but at first scan, she could tell New York was a completely different kind of sewer. These streets were far too dangerous, even for her iron bluster.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find cover as soon as we can.”

“What? Me worry?”

He knew she was. “No, but keep close for good measure.”

Without a mass transit system, they had to navigate the crowded roads on foot. The city had worsened since Emil’s last visit.

“How do civilized people live like this? And to think, I thought we had it bad after the bombings.”

“You should’ve seen it before the Reckoning. It was quite the town... quite the country”

“Muck America. If it weren’t for them, we would still have a home.”

“That’s not true. Americans didn’t betray us. It was one man — James Orock.”

“But, America started the war.”

“Like Hell they did. The Alliance attacked them. They were just defending themselves.”

“You’re talking about the Reaper Virus? I’ve heard that excuse a thousand times.”

“Well, it’s true. The virus destroyed everything living except the people. What is left of the United States is packed inside this thirteen hundred square kilometer patch of dirt.”

“What about that part up there?” She pointed to the floating city above their heads.

“The Hi-8? That’s where the elitist live. Down here is the Lo-5. Nothing but the dregs.”

“How many live up there?”

“Probably no more than half a million.”

“You’re mucking joking?”

“No.”

“Then how many are —“

“Down here? Close to eighty million. Now you understand why Romania sided with America in the war.”

“I didn’t know it was this bad for them.”

“That’s understandable. It happened before your time. Want to know something else? When Russia first formed the Alliance, there were many Romanians who didn’t want a war with them. We hoped, by bargaining for neutrality, the Russia Imperium would grant us clemency. I was one of them.”

“It’s hard for me to see the Haiduc as a peace activist.”

“Believe me, I’m not proud of it. Hindsight is a curse. If we knew then what we know now... the world would be a better place.”

He stood in the center of the street and reminisced. “You see that building there?”

“Which one?”

“The ugly, fat one. That’s the Soros. It’s about seventy years old. See the newer one above it? That’s Mercer Tower, one of the original Hi-8 structures. I remember the first time I saw the Mercer hovering there, like some optical illusion. It was as if God himself had descended from the heavens and erased the bottom of a skyscraper, leaving only the disembodied top as evidence of its prior existence.”

Adi laughed. “You sound like an intzelept rambling about the old days.”

“Muck you,” he said, yanking her hood down over her head.

“Are we done with the past, grandfather?”

“Yes, smartass.”

He pulled her close and they resumed the journey.

They footed for over an hour before stopping at a street market to buy food and rest. Adi could not believe the going price of anything resembling real food. Emil had euro-marks, but the price of two green apples alone threatened their budget, so they settled for gelrats instead. They didn’t mind the sour fructose aftertaste. These welfare rations were better than the moldy army provisions they were accustomed to.

While she slurped down the last gooey drops from her pack, a few meters over, a viewer played an eye-catching video of a beautiful model sauntering about in an artificial world. The wind blew her long cerulean hair to enhance the seduction factor and sunlight radiated off her naked body. In the center of her forehead glowed a starburst crystal. It was a beacon, calling out for attention.

“Ora,” tempted the seductive woman on the screen. “Experience the sensation of true unity — by Zolaris.”

When the beauty leaned over to plant the gift of her kiss, the video flickered and transitioned into a different promo.

Emil didn’t know what to think;
oras are being marketed to humans
?

“Behold,” the narrator declared as an image of the Spire dominated the screen. “The Spire. After ten years of around the clock work and several trillion euro-marks, it is now ready to light humanity’s way to the future. Standing as the largest and most expensive architectural enterprise in history, it is the greatest achievement for our corporate benefactor, Zolaris. Watch the live feed of the inaugural celebration here tomorrow.”

The old warhorse scratched his beard. Adi noticed his subdued reflex to the holo-cast. He obviously knew about the Spire before now.

Nearby, a kid made a desperate attempt to snatch a green apple from a cart. He succeeded in procuring the fruit, but as he dashed away with it clutched in his little hands, the portly merchant rang a small bell.

A brute entered the gap created by shoppers trying to avoid the ensuing disturbance. A quick burst of a long barrel shotgun dropped the boy to the cracked asphalt. The killer fetched the coveted loot from a dead hand and returned it to the merchant. Upon suitable compensation of one silver note, he returned to his hiding spot amid the disinterested market-goers.

Emil grabbed Adi by the arm and pulled her along with a renewed purpose. Sticking around to gawk at the savagery was not a smart thing to do.

“This place is unbelievable. We should’ve done something.”

“It wouldn’t have helped,” he explained. “There is no law here. If we tried to intervene, we would’ve been killed along with the child.”

“I hate this place,” she snapped.

During the rest of the trip, she bided her time in awkward silence.

The jawless man examined the fascinating old coin. Unable to speak, for lack of a mandible and tongue, he communicated via a series of well thought-out taps on a faded letter board. Emil wasn’t entirely convinced this poor chap was the man he needed to speak with. The only clue to his affiliation was the odd red diamond above his brigend mark. Designed to resemble a nevus, a trained eye upon closer examination would see it as a deliberate blemish. It was the calling card of an Agarhan.

Bingo.

Jawbone (the name Emil gave him) looked at the Romanian lei coin, then back to him, and then over at Adi. The man was skittish, taking extra precaution in verifying the coin’s authenticity and its owner. Something must have them spooked, Emil conjectured.

With careful debate, Jawbone pocketed the coin and gave a brief head nod. Emil removed a sealed envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to him.

“Make sure your leader gets it personally.”

Jawbone acknowledged the request by using a weird hand sign. He pulled out an old American silver dollar and handed it to Emil.

“When?”

Signing with taps, the misfit communicated — tomorrow at noon. Without waiting for a goodbye, the mute slipped away.

Adi hovered near the entry smoking another cigarette and pretending to tolerate the cloak and dagger routine. The sun drifted somewhere low above the city and the broken shafts of light filtering down to the Lo-5 waned in splintered lines.

“It’s not a good idea to travel here after sunset. We’ll hunker ‘til morning,” he told her.

She didn’t like the idea of being away from the ship, especially out in the middle of nowhere. But, she knew they wouldn’t make it back to the Bandit before nightfall. Their options surmounted to half one-way and half the other.

While he picked out a secluded spot near a wall to lean against, she removed a laser-marker from her jacket. Activating it, she scorched words on the opposite wall. Satisfied with her handiwork, she stepped back to admire the calligraphy. The words
lupta otopisti
appeared legible with a flare in its pattern, encased inside the cartouche of a crude dog tag shape. She stowed the marker.

He read the message. “Fight the Utopians? You wrote it in Romanian. You do realize, no one here can read it?”

She shrugged her shoulders indifferently at the paradox of making an illiterate political statement.

Fight the Utopians
. The motto had been the battle cry of the Vanguard since the early days of the resistance movement.

Utopians were just another tag for Zolarians... architects of the world’s destruction.

“Stop mucking around and come rest.”

She flicked the cigarette out the entrance and walked over to him. “I was just having fun.”

“I could see that,” he said.

She dropped beside him. While he tried to rest, she nervously fingered her hair. Her silent sulking was loud.

“What’s on your mind, Commander?”

“Nothing, sir.” She curled the inflection of sir. The womanly passive-aggressive arguing didn’t suit her.

“Adi, spit it out.”

She waited for dramatic effect. “You’re not giving me a lot to go on.”

“I figured you would come back to this. You’ll have to trust me. End of discussion.”

“You never kept me out like this.”

“End-of-discussion.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but he raised a stern finger and pointed it at her. She crossed her arms and returned to pouting.

An hour passed.

In the pitch black, every sound seemed amplified tenfold. A strange noise startled Emil and he lifted his head. He listened until he felt safe to lower his guard. The shifting of his body woke her.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“I was thinking of when I first found you.”

They thought about that day in the refugee camp outside of Prague. She was too young to remember the nuclear nightmare, or how she came to live amid the camp’s squalor. Her only companion was Cob. He was four, but starvation made him looked two. Adi, a few years older and just as sickly, protected him like a mother wolf would a cub.

Emil found the orphans, unsheltered in the mud and rain. It was the display of their naked bodies, caked with filth and clinging to each other that brought him back from desolation’s void. Before that moment, he believed his heart had long since ceased to beat. In his grief, he lived as if he had no humanity left. Animal detachment shielded him from the loss of his mother, sister, and his culture.