I am serialising my dystopian/retro-futuristic sci-fi story here. Here is the sixth chapter, titled “The Quarrymen”.
All chapters can be found here.
I will be adding a new chapter every Friday (when I don’t forget, sorry!).
Chapter 05 – The Quarrymen
The labour exchange at the Maglev train depot was chaotic and packed. Thousands of workers were pushing and shoving each other, trying to get a ticket and board a train to the quarries, where they could earn coupons to survive.
Kantary charged workers one coupon for travel out to the quarry and one for bringing them back. Brokers would buy up hundreds of these tickets and then resell them to labourers and day workers at a markup.
He was at the labour exchange with his comrade so that they could buy their way, under the guise of being labourers, to the quarry for the night shift.
They were at the cage, where a broker sat behind bars, selling tickets for a Maglev to the quarry to work a shift, smashing rocks and moving rubble.
“How much?” he asked the broker behind the bars.
“Four coups there, four coups back,” the broker said as he smoked a cigar and counted a wad of coupons.
“I need two tickets,” he said.
“Only one left for a train you can catch…take it or the guy behind you will,” said the broker, not looking up from his counting.
“40 for two,” he insisted.
The broker stopped his counting, looking up and eyeing the man before him coolly.
“Show me your coups,” he said.
He showed two 20-valued coupons that his comrade had taken from her coupon book.
“40 for two,” said the broker, smiling unpleasantly, and pulling two return tickets from his breast pocket.
He pushed the coupon through the bars, and the broker passed him the tickets.
“Better run. Your train leaves in four minutes. Have a nice day!”
He snatched the tickets, and the pair of them ran from the cage, pushing through the throngs of workers looking for a ticket to the quarries they could afford to buy.
“What gate?” shouted his comrade behind him.
“32,” he yelled, pushing through the crowds of scruffy labourers.
They were by gate 27 and could see 28 ahead.
“Move! Get out the way! Move it!” he was saying, pushing and shoving, and being pushed and shoved back.
“Gate 32 closing shortly for the next departure to the main quarry terminus,” said a female, synthetic voice over the public address system.
They arrived at gate 32 as the barriers were being drawn shut, and people were hurrying through the gap.
“Hey, we got tickets!” he demanded at the attendant behind the barrier.
“You won’t make it,” said the attendant, his face disinterested.
“We will. Open the fucking gate!”
The attendant shrugged and unlocked the gate. The pair of them sprinted through, running down the platform. The carriages were packed, with no room to spare. The lights on the side of the train began flashing, and an alarm sounded.
“Train at gate 32 departing to the main quarry terminus,” said a female, artificial voice over the public address system.
They ran to the open doors, a wall of bodies blocking their way. They began pushing and shoving and were punched and kicked. He punched back, dropping a man who fell to the platform, creating a space for him to push into. He pushed deeper, his comrade behind him, forcing their way onto the train, as those on the train fought back and cursed, as the steel doors to the train started closing.
“Watch the backpack!” he screamed as the doors closed. They fought their way into the carriage, and his comrade managed to twist, allowing the backpack to avoid being crushed.
They were in. Shoulder to shoulder with the other workers, off to the quarry. It was hot and hard to breath, the smelly bodies packed together. The train lurched; a humming noise filled the air as it glided forward, leaving the depot. Once outside of the wire, the Maglev train accelerated, racing away and out across the prairies.
He was the pilot. His job was to get them to the surface, gather intelligence, and support his comrade, the explosives expert. Once they had confirmation that the mission was a success, he would get them off the planet, hiding the jumpship in an exhaust vent on one of the freighters far above in orbit, where they would then go back into hibernation and then rendezvous with the Covert Operations Squadron at a meeting point.
He had never met his comrade until this mission; he knew nothing about him other than that he was a comrade in arms of the Squadron.
He thought of her, suddenly. She was the one that the general had told them all about. The general, in his asymmetrical warfare classes, had posed the question to the group, ‘If you could sacrifice one life to save many, is it not worth the sacrifice of that one innocent life?’
One for many, the doctrine was called.
If you have to sacrifice the life of one prostitute to expose the lies and corruption, and to free the people of this slave planet, is it not worth it…?
“People will die,” the general had said. “In wars, people die. Good people die. Innocent people die. This is, sadly, a fact of war. So when we ask, ‘Is it worth the sacrifice of that one innocent life?’ – the answer is yes.
“Good and innocent people have died providing the intelligence we use to plan our missions, so if an innocent has to die, for your mission’s objectives to be achieved, to save more good and innocent lives, then that is war.”
She is the one for many, he thought.
He had graduated at the top of the asymmetrical warfare class, had commendations, was ideologically sound, and was an operations veteran, this being his tenth and most dangerous mission yet.
But on the other missions, he just flew them in and got them out. This time it was different.
He thought of her, sitting alone in a cafe, smoking a cigarette. He thought of her wearing her fur coat, shopping for food, looking so alone. He thought of her in the club, wearing stilettos and a dress, drinking cocktails, and seemingly happy. And then he thought of her wet, terrified face in his hand, as he compelled her to do as she was bid, and become the one for many.
He was more than a pilot. He was a man. A man who was having feelings and thoughts, feelings and thoughts he was not supposed to have. He thought of her, and the only feeling he had was a terrible guilt.
He tried not to think about it. He tried not to think about her. He tried not to think of her face. He tried to stay focussed on the mission. But his mind wandered to her, alone and sad, and now in terrible, terrible danger.
He had given her a blaster, and when they came for her, she could use it on them or use it on herself. What else could he do?
Nothing, he told himself. You can do nothing.
You are a soldier on a mission. Nothing is more important than the mission—one for many!
The copies of the documents she had delivered were a goldmine of intelligence. They had the deputy director’s entire itinerary, down to the minute, of where he would be and what he would be doing.
And of key interest to the pilot and his comrade was the media event at the quarry, and ‘the blast’ of the new seam, for the media.
The train arrived at the quarry main terminus. On the platform were smaller trains that the labourers piled into, which trundled away, heading to the quarries.
The quarry was a vast, open-cast mine, surrounded by sheer, terraced white cliffs, streaked with blue Gravitite ore. Explosive charges were detonated, collapsing a face of the cliffs, and then the rocks were broken up and piled by the labourers into loaders and sent to the Gravitite refining facility.
The shift master shouted orders through a megaphone, instructing them to collect picks, hammers, and shovels, and then to start work in the latest rubble field. Milpol guards stood on gantries above, holding blasters and watching everything.
It was hard, primitive work, smashing big rocks into smaller rocks, then heaving the smaller rocks into hovering barrows that zipped away when full, with another empty one taking its place.
It was cold and dusty. Their faces wrapped in scarves, googles over their eyes. The pair of them were working on the fringe of the rocking smashing crew.
“Where are we?” he asked, swinging a hammer, splitting open a rock, exposing a vein of deep blue Gravitite.
“East side, by the active seam,” his comrade said.
“And where will the target be?”
“West side, atop the cliffs,” said his comrade, smashing a rock.
“And what’s the plan?”
“Get ready to move,” said the comrade, heaving a block of rock into the barrow and dropping something down the side.
The barrow zipped away, full, and a new barrow glided over.
The full barrow headed north, joining other barrows zipping along, and then, when about 200 metres away, it burst into flames.
The workers and Milpol guards were distracted, staring as the burning barrow zipped along, black smoke billowing from it. The Kantary supervisors began panicking and running after the burning barrow, shouting into radios.
They slipped away into the darkness, dashing off among the huge boulders of rock that had yet to be smashed.
The two commandos moved stealthily through the towering monoliths of fractured blue and white rock, moving undetected westward until they reached the base of the cliffs.
They hid in a tunnel bored into the rock, and his comrade took a device from his breast pocket. It projected a 3D hologram image of the quarry.
“We are here, in these tunnels,” he said, zooming into the image. “The target will be above where we are, but about 2,500 metres due north.
“The target will be the setting off of a blast, on the east side, in a demonstration for the media. There is another set of tunnels below where the media will be set up, and that’s where we will plant the device.”
He drank some water as his comrade tucked the imaging device away.
They left the tunnel, heading due north in the darkness to plant the device.