Raiders (9 page)

Kama sighed. “Thank you, Colonel Nelson. I will think it over.”

The Colonel said, “Kama you know for the first time in your life you may meet people who actually care about you. You could have a real life here. Most of us here live into our seventies. I know that sounds impossible to you but we do. Just think it over. Get some rest Kama.” He waved at her, turned and walked out.

After four days Kama was able to walk on her own again. The Medical Centre was continuously visited by City citizens who all wanted to meet the now-famous Kama, the great captured Raider whose reputation blew up into something larger than life itself. Over time she decided to tell the City officials everything about her, the Raiders, the mysterious City in which they lived and much more.

This is what Kama told them.

The Raiders refer to themselves as the
Jia Ting
,
which is simply Mandarin Chinese for
the Family.
The Jia Ting are a large group at least by twenty-sixth century standards. She didn’t know exactly how many but she guessed there were at least a hundred thousand, maybe even more than that. They lived in an underground city far to the South, located under the ruins of the City once called Montreal. The city is simply called
Reso
, which is not Chinese but a French word, a carryover from its original name, the
réseau
,
French for
the network
.

The Reso was once one of the largest underground complexes in the old world. Montreal itself used to be a cold place for about seven months out of the year but today the snows never fall there any more. When the climate shifted to sub-tropical back in the late twenty-second century palm trees and southern pines grew there and even alligators found their way into the river system that surrounded the once great city. The rains stopped coming and the entire area became a desert expanse. On the surface, Montreal was abandoned but a few stayed behind, underground, in the Reso. The majority of entrances that once were part of the Reso were buried in sand and dirt, abandoned and lost to time and weather forever.

While most of Kama’s story was nothing new, the next part was. The historical belief held that Montreal and the Reso were completely abandoned and buried into extinction. Even after the Great Storms brought rain once more to the South and things grew there again the belief was that the area was too hostile and angry for anyone to survive, but this was actually not true. What was true was that a small group of survivors held strong to one section of the Reso underground and even maintained a population there through it all, past the the years of sands and storms, through the years of drought and the years of flood and wind.

The survivor population grew over time and they evolved into master scavengers. Over the generations they increased their talent for pulling anything of value for their survival from the great abandoned Cities, even the ones that were impossibly far away. They were proficient in surviving the Wastes even without advanced mechanised transports of any kind. It was difficult to imagine how anyone could survive out there. B But they did, somehow.

The Jia Ting developed a natural abhorrence for technology and development. They used solar and some wind power but almost everything was done manually. The reason: They believed that the Age Of Engines was the sole cause for the advent of the severe climatic changes and the lust for a casual, labor-free life was to blame. Everything was made by hand with a few special exceptions such as weapons.

It was obvious to the Jia Ting that the Old Cities were never meant to be. The Old Cities were considered great failures of mankind, wiped from the face of the earth as an insult to their existence and true purpose. The Jia Ting believed that the only real purpose of these lost Old Cities was to provide for them the materials that they needed in the wake of the Cities’ derelictions because, except for the Polar Cities far to the North, they were the only remaining organized group of humans left alive south of the Arctic Circle.

Kama went on to tell them that the Jia Ting were so efficient at traveling the Wastes that their outreach became far. They slowly recovered survivors who they found sprinkled across the land, sometimes two thousand kilometers out from the Reso or even further. Most of the time the survivors would simply come back when discovered as they were transfixed from the stories of this great underground City and its promise of protection against the Storms and the other hazards inherent within the New World. Other times they were brought back by force but only if they were deemed valuable to the Jia Ting in some way or another.

Kama’s ancestors were recovered by force, at least that‘s what her mother told her when she was very young. They were found near Windfall Lake in old Wisconsin as part of a small gathering of refugees who ended up there all the way from California. The Raiders killed off the majority but recovered only three captives, two were Kama’s great grandparents. The Jia Ting elders discovered somehow that Kama’s family were descendants of the old Russian and Chinese genetic modification program. Kama's family had traveled as far as they could until their supplies ran dry. Her ancestors landed deep inside the northern United States and far away from Asia and the western coast where they shot you if they even
thought
that you might possibly be one of the surviving genetically modified hybrids spawned from secret tunnel labs in Moscow and Beijing.

The survivability for an enhanced specimen was discovered to be less than one tenth of one percent so euthanasia was an everyday affair for this desperate program. The irony was not lost on the rare survivors that the original purpose for the gen-mod program was to engineer anew race of humans designed to be resilient enough after the earth fell to the chaos and the great changes to come. Most were simply killed, even after they survived and thrived in the hostile New World climate.

That was the best that Kama could do to remember her past and origin.

Kama went on to describe various minor aspects of the Reso and the Jia Ting. No detail went unrecorded here. The Elders group consisted of twelve men.
The Chosen
were the Elders’ pool of female companions of whom Kama was one. There are thirty-six Chosen women at any given time. The Chosen are hand picked from the population after careful scrutiny including ancestry, early personality profiles, endurance, aesthetics and intelligence. In short, they removed the most attractive, strongest and most intelligent girls from their families. Resistance to this process results in the disposal of the girl’s entire family along with their friends and anyone who is close to them. Kama heard stories of the early times when the Elders would meet family resistance and rebellion against the picking process. Sometimes entire blocks of the Jia Ting disappeared over the night. The next morning they were simply gone. Rumors spread and eventually the fear was so great amongst the Jia Ting common people that sometimes mothers would beg the passing Auditors to take their daughters away to the Temple in hopes that they might live a better life than the brief and hardscrabble existence lived out by the generations before.

Twelve Tribes consist the entirety of the Jia Ting, each governed by a single Elder. Each Tribe has an assigned role to maintain the survivability of their City. One Elder operates as a king for their Tribe with a diminishing tree of power beneath him. Each Tribe has it’s own set of customs or Stela, determined by the leaders.

This modular nature offered a built-in survivability factor for the Reso at large was designed to sustain the loss of as many as seven Tribes. At the Reso’s center there is the main tribe called the Tribe of the Temple, responsible for all the commerce, trade and bartering, the trials and courts, distribution and the overarching City logistics needs such as asset allocation and deployment.

The Temple was where Kama lived from the time she was assigned to The Chosen. Kama said that she belonged to no particular Elder but believed that the High Elder in charge of the Temple liked her more than the others. She based this thought on his frequent calls for her.. He treated her with a certain fatherly gentleness that the other eleven did not show.

The High Elder oversees all the other Elders for the Tribes. His word is absolute and never debated. She guessed that the High Elder was maybe fifty years or fifty-five-ish, one of the oldest men in the entire city of Reso. The other Elders ranged in age from about twenty-eight to maybe forty-five or so. Kama explained that thirty was considered quite an advanced age there.

“What else do you want to know?” Kama asked as she looked from face to face across the large oval table. “Is that enough or do you want more?”

“Tell us about your tattoos. They sure are something. Looks like you spent a lot of time under the needle,” Major Molliana said from clear across the table. He appeared to stare up and down her body but incredibly it did not seem to bother Kama at all.

She looked down at her right arm and said, “These. I would rather not talk about that. They aren’t important to you, anyways. Okay?”

Colonel Eiger raised his hand and graveled up his voice in an effort to throw out a more authoritative tone, mainly for the benefit of the younger soldiers and said, “That’s fine Kama. Guys, let’s stick to tactical questions. This isn’t a show and tell here. We are lucky to have this woman here now to even talk to us. Am I clear?”

“Yes sir, clear sir!” Everyone in the room rang out at once excepting Kama..

“Great. Okay crew, any other questions for our guest?” Colonel Eiger panned around the table.

Special Officer Petra raised her hand. “I have one sir. Kama, do you any idea how many of these Coilguns the Raiders have in their arsenal? Like, ten? Or ten thousand?”

Kama said, “How many, hmmm. I don’t know. Many, I think. I saw a lot of them stacked up in one of the storage tunnels.”

“How many would you guess?”

Kama puttered her lips and said, “Phhh. I don’t know. Five hundred maybe? That was just one supply stock though. I have not even a guess to give you. I will just say, a lot.”

“Okay thank you. Anyone else?” Colonel Eiger asked.

Master Sergeant Garcia squeaked his chair forward a smidge and said, “Yes I have one question for Miss Kama. Umm, so this Reso, it’s all underground like the City here but the tunnels are old, like centuries old, right? What kind of defense do you, umm, they have set up on their perimeter? Can you tell us?”

“Defense?” Kama shook her head and scrunched her shoulders.

“Yes, defense. I mean do they have mechanical barriers? Razor wire? Mounted weapons at the tunnel entrances? What are we talking here?”

Kama nodded her head and said, “Sir, that is Reso. There is no need for any defense with the Reso.”

“No defense? Really? I don’t understand I mean there must be some tactical outlay for contingencies.”

She stared straight at Garcia who sat five chairs down on the left side. She briefly laughed and smirked. She said, “It is Reso. Nobody dares. The Tribes do not defend themselves against anyone.
Everyone
defends themselves against us. Besides, who is left out there alive in the Wastes to strike us?”

The Master Sergeant lowered his eyelids. “I see, interesting. Thank you.”

Colonel Eiger announced, “Kama will continue to be available for intelligence and questioning for the time being. The big question of course on everybody’s mind is why the Raiders are engaging our outermost frontline people.” he turned to Kama’s place across the large table. “And Kama I apologize for calling your people Raiders but that’s just what we’ve been calling you for so long now, we really didn’t have any name to go on. It’s not an insult, it’s just the word we use to identify your Tribes.”

“Okay,” Kama responded.

The Colonel said, “So as I was saying the big pregunta all on our minds is the
why.
We have already asked her this and the honest answer is she simply doesn’t know. I know it sounds intuitively fishy and just plain wrong but the Raiders’ hierarchy is different than what we are used to within our civilization here. Decisions are obviously made from the top-down there and all anyone probably has to know below the Elders level is that they think of our Polar City as the bad guys. We are the evidently the evil City, and to what end we really don’t know.”

Colonel Eiger continued. “Kama here doesn’t know either and we believe in our analysis that she is being honest with us. So our current status will remain. Our outer patrols will be quadrupled for personnel and they will be outfitted with stronger ordnance than the usual shuck and jive light armaments we usually deploy. The heavies will also be sent out at intervals. Our entire perimeter, all six and a half kilometers of it will be covered with the one-o-five cannons, support in spaced intervals.”

Professor Palmer who stood on the group’s outer perimeter near the exit raised his hand and said, “Kama I have a quick question. What were you doing out there, anyways? Before you were captured.”

Colonel Eiger said, “Doc when we recovered her companion we found on his body an automapping device. All they had to do was walk around the outer ring of the Wall and they would have captured a fully functioning map of the entire border of our City to a depth of about fifty meters.”

“So they were on some kind of mapping mission.”

“Yes, Doctor, you are correct.”

“But, what does that mean exactly? I mean why would they want to map the Wall?”

Colonel Eiger looked at Kama then scanned around the entire table and said, “Kama was probably never told the actual reason for their Scouting deployment, but I know exactly why.”

“Why, sir?”

“Why? There is only one reason why any military force would want a high resolution layout of a fortified structure. What this means Doctor, is that they are coming.”

Everyone in the room murmured to each other with sighs and subdued gasps. Everyone except for Kama who simply sat there and scowled down at the table, silent.

Two months passed by since the meeting and Colonel Eiger’s decision to increase the outer patrols and military presence outside the City wall. No reports of any Raider activity. Not a single Raider was sighted outside. An Expedition was deployed to repair and provide maintenance for the solar tower which powered the City. Built over 750 miles to the south, the solar tower was engineered to be as maintenance free as possible but still required some attention and parts replacement now and again. The repair crew said nothing out of the ordinary during their long journey.