Vindicators: The Run - Ch. 1

VINDICATORS: The Run

CHAPTER ONE
"Augustine"

         It was the start of a brand new day.
         An hour earlier, the day seemed to be off to a good start. An hour earlier, the day had been full of promise. An hour earlier the weather looked fair, and all was quiet. An hour earlier it looked like the Augustine Resistance would go one more day without being found by the Company men.
         But all the promise and all the quiet were gone in an instant. They were replaced with the percussion of gunshots all around. In an instant, Company men were attacking them from all sides like a swarm of locusts.
         An hour earlier, Jace Ryan had been standing in the camp’s guard tower watching the sun rise with his sister Jade. The next thing he knew, he was running. Not for his life, but for hers.
         Jade had been standing the pre-dawn watch in the tower at the front gate of the camp. Since she was a young, able-bodied woman, she insisted on taking a turn at watch. She had no qualms about taking the pre-dawn shift because she enjoyed watching the sun rise. She and her brother had watched every day with their mother when she was still alive. Now that she had passed on, the siblings carried on the tradition. Sometimes when they saw the first light of the day, it seemed like she was still watching with them.
         Jade watched as the sun filtered through the trees and the mountains in the distance and painted the clear sky with varying shades of yellow and blue. She felt an arm slip around her shoulders and she began to react. Before she could, Ryan was kissing her on the top of her head. Reluctantly, she relaxed her shoulders.
         “If you don’t quit sneaking up on me like that, I’m going to catch you while you’re sleeping and tie a bell around your neck.”
         He chuckled. “And good morning to you.” He looked down at her in time to catch her wiping tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.
         His teasing grin turned into a sad one. “There’s lots of ghosts in those woods,” he said, gesturing towards the trees. “You’re thinking about Mom and Dad again, aren’t you?”
         She nodded, then leaned into him.
         “I miss them too,” he said. “They'd be proud of you, you know.”
         Jade shrugged and sighed heavily. “I know they’d be proud of you. Adam and Linnea started up this group, but you keep us together. You're always taking care of all of us. Mom wanted me to be a doctor. A real doctor. I trained as a doctor and as a chemist. But instead of using my chemistry training to heal people, I make explosives. Blowing things up is my contribution to all this.”
         Her brother turned her around and held her far enough away that he could look into her eyes. “All Mom wanted was for you to be the best at whatever you do.”
         “Okay,” she replied. “So I’m the best at blowing things up. I still don’t think that’s what she had in mind, though.”
         “And you are a real doctor. You may not have finished all your training, but you know enough medicine to patch us up when we're hurt, and you’ve never lost a patient yet. Although I have to admit, nobody blows things up the way you do."
         Jade chuckled as she spun away from him and waved off his comments. "That sounds nice,” she said with a wry grin. “I think. But you're my big brother. You’re supposed to be supportive and nurturing and such."
         "And you're my little sister," her brother replied. "You're supposed to be all rebellious and obnoxious. What happened?” As she opened her mouth to answer, a mischievous grin spread across his lips. “Oh, wait. . .”
         Jade’s eyes widened, and she answered his teasing with a soft punch to the shoulder. She let out an infectious giggle, and before long her brother found himself laughing with her.
         “So what's the plan for today?” she asked.
         “I thought I’d take a trip to Beauregard today to see Karr,” he replied. “He should have the next bunch of weapons ready for us. Want to join me?”
         Jade frowned and shook her head. “If you were going anywhere else I’d be right there with you. But Tavion Karr is one of the creepiest guys I’ve ever met. Somehow he manages to get even creepier when there’s a woman around. Thanks, but no thanks. Doesn’t your girlfriend want to go with you?”
         Ryan chuckled. “Magenta’s not exactly my girlfriend.”
         “Yeah yeah,” Jade said impatiently. “I know. It’s complicated.”
         Her brother opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.
         “I’ve seen the way you look at her when she’s not looking. And I’ve seen the way she looks at you when you’re not looking. Neither of you knows it, but she’s your girlfriend.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Come to think of it, I wouldn’t let Karr anywhere near her if I was you.”
         His response was cut off by the sound of his name being called from the ground below.
         “We're up in the tower,” he called back.
         They both turned towards the ladder in time to see one of the men struggling to the top under the weight of all the pouches of equipment he was carrying on his belt. After he got to the top, he ran a hand through his sandy brown hair as he fought to get his breath back.
         “I’m glad I found you Captain,” he said between breaths.
         Ryan cringed internally. He was a leader of this group, but he hated being called ‘Captain.’ The group had three leaders, but he was the only one that anybody ever called that. Adam and Linnea had a say in the more military aspects of the group, of course. But for the most part, they trusted Ryan’s judgment and left the decisions on such matters to him. They were responsible for organizing the day-to-day work details that were vital to keeping the camp running. They dealt well with handling the growing and gathering of food, bringing the camp a water supply, and the hundreds of maintenance tasks that had to be done. But they weren't fighters. The camp’s militia always went to Ryan when it was something serious. Or bad. “And I’m glad you called me that,” he said dryly. “What’s going on?”
         “The patrol didn’t check in last night, Sir. We sent a party out to find ‘em this mornin’. They found Innis and Delvin shot dead about two or three miles out, but no sign o’ the others.”
         “Didn’t Magenta go out on that patrol?” Jade asked.
         Ryan nodded slowly but gave no other reply.
         “Yes she did, Miss,” replied the runner. “No one found any sign of her. She and the others must have been taken prisoner. I’m sorry, Sir.”
         “Reyal was in that group, too,” Ryan said, trying not to think about Magenta. “He’s not the most trustworthy person I’ve ever seen. In fact, we put Magenta on his details just to keep an eye on him. If Reyal got captured, I wouldn’t put it past him to give us up.”
         “And Magenta?” asked Jade. “Do you think she’s all right?”
         He was slow to answer, and when he did Jade thought she heard a small catch in his voice. “She wouldn’t have given them anything they could use. If they caught her, she’s probably dead by now.” He fell silent for a moment. The idea that anything could have happened to Magenta tore at his heart, but he forced himself to stop thinking about her. If everyone else was to be saved, he couldn’t dwell on it. He had to assume that everyone in the party was dead, that Reyal had given them up, and that the Company men knew where they were. The troopers would be coming for them soon. It was time to go.
         His voice was barely louder than a whisper when he spoke again. “Have you told Adam and Linnea yet?”
         “No, sir, Captain,” the runner replied.
         “Wait. What about the dampening field? Has anybody checked on the generators this morning?” he silently cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner.
         The runner shook his head. “I checked on them, sir. They were staked into the ground last night, but they’re not there now.”
         The key to their cell being hidden for so long was the dampening field that surrounded the base. Ryan had bought it from some of his off-world contacts. Four small generators were staked into the ground at the four corners of the camp. When they were activated, they created an energy field that masked any energy traces within the field so that scanners couldn’t pick them up. They also generated a hologram that blocked the camp from view. Instead of a fenced in group of buildings in the middle of the woods, all anyone could see was more trees.
         Ryan‘s dark eyes narrowed. “We’re going to find Adam and Linnea. You man the tower. Without the dampening field they’ll be able to see us and you can bet they’ll be coming in hard. It won’t be long before they get here. The minute you see them, you let us know.”
         “Right, sir.”
         Ryan’s feet barely touched the ladder as he went down after him. Jade brought up the rear. By the time she reached the bottom rung of the ladder, he was already gone. She had to run hard, but after about thirty yards, she caught up to him. Some of the others began to stir. It was time for the details to begin their assignments. The perimeter patrols were organizing. A small group was going to the stores for food and some wood to build a fire. Ryan stopped them.
         “There’s no time,” he told them. “The dampening field is down...”
         His next thought was cut off by the guard in the tower shouting “We’ve got Company!”
         Ryan climbed the fence to get a look at what they were dealing with. Company men were coming, all right. And they were coming in force. They were moving in close ranks, and were hidden so deeply in the foliage that he almost didn’t see them. They were in their traditional black uniforms, which blended in well with the shadows beneath the trees. Even their pulse rifles had been painted a flat black so that there would be no sun glare as they carried them. They seemed to be coming from all directions, and they were moving fast! At the rate they were moving, it would only be a few minutes until they would be on top of them. Before Jade could even react, her brother started running for the armory. In the loudest voice he could manage, he hollered "Incoming!"
         “Captain!” Ryan heard a deep booming voice shouting behind him. He knew without looking that the voice belonged to Hume, the camp’s Sergeant at Arms. Being called ‘Captain’, along with Hume’s stiff salute made Ryan wince. They called Hume ‘Sergeant at-Arms’, or just ‘Sarge’ because he was ex-Company, and he took the military aspect of being in the resistance a bit more seriously than Ryan and the others would have liked. “You’re my commander,” he’d told Ryan once. “That makes you Captain.”
         “Okay,” said Ryan. “First, stop doing that. Second, you get everybody awake and you get them armed. Form a main firing line at the front gate, and two others a hundred meters behind them. Use the storehouse and the armory for cover. Bottleneck the troopers at the gate. If they get through, draw them away from the living quarters.”
         “Right away, Captain.” After another stiff salute, Hume was off to carry out his orders. Ryan shook his head as he watched him run off. He was as efficient as hell, and that certainly counted for something in a fight. But Ryan still wished he would stop calling him ‘Captain.’
         Most of the rebels fled towards the hangar, which was the largest building in the camp. The engines of three escape ships were giving off a bluish glow, evidence that they were prepped for launch. As Ryan had ordered, a small group set up at the front gate in order to buy the others some time to get away. He’d planned this escape a few weeks earlier when they found the Company were getting closer and closer to their camp. Ryan knew it would only be a matter of time until the Company found their exact location and decided to raid them. He’d told Adam and Linnea at the time that their best option was to move the camp and be someplace else when the raiding party came. But they decided since they didn’t know for sure what the Company knew, they would stay put. But if the camp was raided, the plan was to send a detachment of men to hold off the attack as best they could while the rest escaped in the three transport ships they had. That way, at least the families could get to safety. So far, all was going according to plan.
         The echoing sounds of the Company men’s weapons could be heard in the ever-shrinking distance. As the sounds got closer and closer, the men who were lined up at the gate grew more and more tense. Finally the guard in the tower became impatient and began firing into the sea of black-clad soldiers that was approaching them.
         Two soldiers at the front of the pack fell, which brought the line to a halt, but only for a moment. The troopers picked up their pace again with the lines parting in the middle as they went past the fallen troopers. One of the men at the center of the oncoming wave stopped as he got to them. He reached his hand behind the chest plate of his body armor and pulled out a grenade. With a satisfied grin, he pulled the pin out of it and threw it as hard as he could at the tower.
         The cylinder landed on the floor at the guard’s feet. He knew the instant it hit the deck what it was. When he saw it, his eyes widened, and he turned to run.
         “Oh, sh…” was all he could get out before the grenade blew, taking him, and the tower, with it.
The tower collapsed sideways and landed just behind the front gate. Two more grenades were tossed on the pile of wood and metal. They exploded, causing the wood to catch fire. The vines that covered the outside of the fence, and the fire began to spread around the outside of the structure.
         The Company men simply flipped the visors on their helmets down over their faces, and they were ready for a fight once again. Their helmets and armor protected them from the flames, while the flaming wreckage piled up at the front gate kept the resistors penned in.
         With their armor, better weapons, and tactical advantages, the Company men were even more emboldened than they’d been to begin with. They abandoned any tactics and simply started torching everything and shooting everyone in sight.
         When Ryan and Jade reached the storehouse, Ryan looked over at the living quarters next door. Ryan saw two bodies lying motionless on the ground in front of the door. He ran to them, with Jade following close behind.
         Ryan called out to them, but there was no answer. Linnea was lying on her back. Her brown hair and fair skin were streaked with dried blood. Her dark eyes, once vibrant and full of life and hope, were now staring lifelessly at the sky. Her husband was slumped face down across her mid-section with his arms draped over her. His broad back was still smoking from where he had been shot.
         “Linnea,” he said. Ryan felt her neck for a pulse, but there was none. He closed his eyes and hung his head. “They’re gone,” he said. “Looks like they killed her first, and then shot him in the back as he was kneeling over her.”
         Jade stared wide-eyed at the scene in front of her. Her mouth flew open, and she quickly covered it with both hands. She tore her eyes away from the sight of her fallen friends. The pained expressions of their suffering were still on their faces, even in death. The knowledge that someone she knew had died in such pain made her shiver.
         Then, she saw something that chilled her even more. Dark smoke was pouring out of the structure from just about every crack and crevice. “The living quarters?”
         “Looks like they’ve been through already,” he said sadly.
         Jade looked at him apprehensively. “You remember what’s in there, don’t you?”
         His brain was still taking in what had happened to Adam and Linnea, but he quickly caught up to her. “Your explosives.”
         At the same time, they turned and ran as hard as they could.
         The ground shook as the explosion thundered through the camp, and the ground came up to meet Ryan’s face without warning.
         He shook off the shock and sat up. As he looked over at Jade, she was slowly sitting up too. He turned back where the living quarters had been a few seconds ago, and saw that it was now a hole in the ground with a few bits of brick surrounding it. The building, and everything in it, was gone, compliments of Jade’s special explosive mix. It was her own recipe for napalm, but its kick was about twenty times more powerful.
         We could have used some of that stuff right about now, he thought to himself.
         “I wonder how many troopers were in there,” Ryan thought aloud. “Probably not enough to even this fight.”
         “Our home,” Jade said, still in shock. “Our friends. They’re gone.” She looked as if she was about to break down and cry.
         Then, as if someone flipped a switch, her eyes narrowed, and her expression hardened. She angrily reached up and wiped the tears from her eyes.
         “To hell with this,” she snapped. “It can’t end this way. I won’t let it!” She strode off towards the rear of the camp. After a few steps, she had broken into a run.
         Usually he could count on Jade to keep her head in a fight. She was as careful and deliberate a fighter as he had ever seen. But he also knew that she could lose herself in a moment, and he suspected that this moment was a little too much for her. He called after her, but she was running too hard to stop.
         The skirmish at the front gate was getting desperate. Firing lines had been formed inside the gate, just as Ryan had ordered, with about fifteen men on each. They were being overwhelmed as the black clad Company troopers poured through the entrance and over the flaming barricade like a tidal wave. The men on the lines, to their credit, stood their ground. But they were outnumbered at least three to one, and Resistance bullets were no match for Company armor, which was enough to keep even the most accurate of shots from harming its wearer.
To make matters even worse for the Resistance, the flames had made their way around the vines on the outside of the walls, and now they were all trapped inside a ring of fire that surrounded the base as the smoke got thicker and visibility started to lessen.
         Jade Ryan ran as fast as she could to the armory. As she ran, she didn’t notice that her brother had taken off after her.
         As she took a rifle with one hand and reached out to grab some clips of ammunition with the other, a man's hand grabbed her wrist. His grip wasn’t painfully tight, but it was tight enough that she couldn’t pull away from him. She spun fiercely on the owner of the hand and found herself face to face with her brother again.
         “What do you think you're doing?” he asked.
         She tossed her long auburn hair defiantly. “We’ve run from them so many times. I'm going to stay and fight this time!”
         Again she tried to pull away from him, but he refused to let her go.
         “Running is exactly what you’re going to do,” he said. “We have to get those ships in the air, and I want you on one of them.”
         Shots rang out behind them, and the air began to fill with clouds of dust kicked up by the running combatants. Bullets from the resistance guns and pulse rifle blasts from the Company troopers hit the walls all around them. An explosion startled them and drew their attention to the doorway for a moment. Most of the tents were burning by now. Explosions were going off all across the compound as the soldiers laid everything they could see to waste.
         “Get out of here,” Ryan said. “I'll stay and try to hold them off.”
         “I'm staying with you. Now let me go!” She tried to make her aquamarine eyes as hard as diamonds as she stared him down, but she just couldn’t make him back down. He knew her too well.
Still holding his grip on her arm, Ryan shook his head. “Jade! We don’t have time for this. Get out of here now!”
He tried to drag her away towards the hangar, but she fought to hold her ground. Again, she tried to reach for a gun, but he wouldn’t let her reach that far. She finally gave her arm a tug backwards, and he let go of her wrist.
         “I’m not leaving you here!” she shouted. “I’ll take my chances.”
         “You can't stay,” Ryan said. “Go!”
         “We've lost everything.” Jade frowned as thoughts of Magenta flashed quickly through her mind. “You’ve lost everything. I don't want to lose you!”
         “No I haven’t lost everything,” he told her. And I don't intend to. I’m not going to lose you. Go, Jade. Please. I'll find you. I promise.”
         Calmly, her older brother reached over again and took the rifle away from her. He met her angry glare with a forced smile. “You can’t stay here. If we both get caught who’s going to save the universe?”
         Jade's expression softened as Ryan held her gaze. She would have laughed at his attempt at humor if the situation hadn’t been so serious. She took his hand and fought not to cry in front of him, but the tears began to well in her eyes anyway. She realized all at once that she could be saying goodbye to her brother for the last time. She reluctantly let go of his hand.
         “All right. I'll go,” she said. “Be safe. I’ll see you soon.” Then slowly, sadly, she turned away from him, and ran to the nearest transport through the smoke and the dust of the battle. She could only hope she would see her brother alive again.
         Ryan watched her run as fast as she could through the dust and the smoke of the battle. Two troopers picked up on her movement and started shooting at her. Reflexively, Ryan brought his rifle up and fired back at them. The shots bounced harmlessly off of their body armor, but they were distracted long enough for Jade to reach the hangar.
         For a moment, he had thoughts of running after her. He knew this fight was all but lost. He could just as easily climb on the ship with her and get away. Adam and Linnea were already dead. What difference would one more corpse make? He quickly shook the thoughts off, though. He knew that if he ran before the ships could get away, everyone else who had died would have died for nothing. And then there was Jade. She was the only family he had left. She had to get away from this. If his staying would be the difference between that ship making it away or not, then there was only one choice. With his mind made up, he kept firing.
         He looked back and saw Jade climbing on one of the transport ships. As soon as she made it inside, the ramp was drawn up, closing off the hatch. The engines kicked out a ball of fire, and with a whine and a gust of air, the ship began to lift off. A line of troopers on the ground fired their pulse rifles at the escaping ship, but the shots bounced harmlessly off the hull as the ship sped away.
         "Be safe, Jade. I love you," he said as he watched the ship leave. He was going to say more, but a beam from a pulse rifle barely missed his head, drawing his attention back to the battle. He turned, and then he froze. Before he even had time to raise his rifle, he found himself looking over the business end of a pulse rifle. He slowly turned in a circle, and found himself surrounded by black-clad Company troopers.
         As quickly as it had started, the last battle for the Augustine Resistance was over.

The story continues:
Click here for "Vindicators: The Run - Ch. 2"