I am serialising my dystopian/retro-futuristic sci-fi story here. Here is the fourteenth chapter, titled “The Pilot”.
All chapters can be found here.
I will be adding a new chapter every Friday (when I don’t forget, sorry!).
Chapter 14 – The Pilot
Two days had passed. They had seen the first Maglev trains racing away from the ghetto out to the quarry earlier in the day, loaded with miners heading out to smash rocks so Gravitite could be extracted, loaded into shuttles, and sent to the spaceport, where they were transported up to one of the Kantary freighters in orbit.
Deep space exploration required Gravitite, and there could be no disruption to the supply of the fuel that powered the anti-gravity drives, powering the colonisation of the galaxy.
There were still copters patrolling the prairies, and they had seen Milpol patrols in the crumbling, decaying zone. But they hadn’t been found, and now it was time to go.
It was just after dark, and they moved through the debris and crumbling polycrete remains of long-abandoned cell blocks that were too decaying and structurally unsound for even the most destitute of the ghetto.
They were wearing thermal shield smocks to hide them from any copters that zipped overhead, scanning the zone for heat signatures.
A copter buzzed over, hovering and scanning the ruins, a gunner on the side poised to open fire on anything that looked as though it might be a terrorist.
The pair cowered behind a wall, listening to the drone of the copter’s engine as it scanned the ground, and then moved on.
When it was all clear, they moved again, ducking inside a building and pausing. They waited, listening for movement or any sounds that they weren’t alone. When they were sure it was safe, they moved on.
They stopped in what was once a Centre stairwell, spiralling upwards through the building’s broken remains.
“We will plant it here,” said his comrade, taking his backpack off and removing a device that he gently rested on the floor. It was a second anti-grav bomb.
He set himself up, watching the darkness, blaster in hand, covering their exit.
The plan was simple. They would plant the device with a remote trigger attached. They would then crawl through the sewers, back to the poisoned lagoon where the speeder was hidden, and detonate the device, drawing off the Milpol copter patrols, allowing them to escape on the speeder back to the drop ship. When at the drop ship, they would head up to a Kantary freighter, where they would hide their small ship in an intake or exhaust vent and wait for the freighter to fire up its anti-gravity drive and depart.
When the freighter left, they would go into hibernation, and upon its return to Terra Centre, they would awaken and make their rendezvous with the Squadron, completing the mission.
“Are you okay?” Said his comrade as he worked, priming the bomb.
“Yeah,” he said, looking out into the darkness, waiting for a Milpol patrol to appear and the inevitable firefight.
“Are you sure?” Said his comrade.
“What does that mean?” He said, surprised by this.
“I don’t know…you seem distracted,” his comrade said, calm, attaching the remote trigger.
He was distracted. Distracted by the thought of her.
He had told himself hundreds of times not to think about her, that they were soldiers, fighting a war, and that innocent people die in wars, and it was unavoidable, and that he shouldn’t care.
But the more he told himself not to care, the more it seemed he cared.
She will be dead by now, he told himself.
But what if she isn’t dead? What if she is alive, and…And what?
If she weren’t dead, she would most likely be strapped to a table in a torture chamber at Milpol HQ, and wishing she were dead.
“I want to get her out…” he suddenly said.
His comrade froze, and there was silence. A long, tense silence – the only sounds the slow dripping of water somewhere in the gloom.
“You – want – to – get – her – out,” said his comrade, repeating each word slowly. “You mean the whore?”
There was more silence. He looked into the darkness, his hand gripping the blaster, ashamed at what he had said, knowing he was breaching mission protocol, that he was endangering his comrade and himself, but there was nothing he could do.
He had realised that he was unable to leave this planet without fighting for her. He realised that ‘one for many’ worked as a classroom doctrine to be taught to assassins and commandos, but when it had a face, and that face looked so scared, and so alone, and so terrified, and so beautiful, that the classroom doctrine meant nothing, and that he had to try to save her.
“Comrade, she is a collaborator,” his comrade said, now standing, looking at him in stunned disbelief, the remote trigger in one hand.
He spun.
“She…is who we are trying to save!” He snapped back.
There was more silence, his comrade cooly studying his face in the gloom.
“Comrade, she will be dead by now. And if she isn’t dead, she soon will be. We have done our job, and saving collaborator whores is not part of the mission.”
“I don’t fucking care about the mission,” he snapped back.
His comrade, in the darkness, moved his finger to the trigger of the bomb.
“If you go, they will catch you, and I won’t be able to get off this fucking planet. I need you to fly the ship. When they catch you, they will extract everything you have inside of your head, and the rendezvous will be compromised, and the Squadron will be compromised.”
“I am going…” he said.
“Let’s say you do manage to save her, what will you do with her? There are only two hibernation pods, comrade. Once we enter anti-gravity, she will be dead within hours due to lack of oxygen, and frozen solid outside of a hibernation pod.”
“I said…I am going.”
There was silence again.
“I can’t let you do that, comrade. You have two choices. One, stay on mission, and I will forget all about this. Two, try to go and save her, and I detonate the bomb right now, killing you, and killing me.”
His finger hovered over the remote trigger.
“I cannot let you compromise the mission, comrade. So tell me, will you stay on mission, or do we say our goodbyes now?”
There was silence. His hand gripped the blaster tighter as his comrade held the remote trigger, primed to detonate the anti-gravity bomb.
“She is innocent…” he pleaded.
“She isn’t fucking innocent,” his comrade scoffed. “She is a fucking collaborator, comrade. She struts around in her fur coat, drinking cocktails, smoking off-world cigarettes, and sucking Milpol cock.
“The innocents, comrade, are those people in the quarry. The people sleeping rough in ruined buildings. The hundreds of thousands of slaves to Kantary digging the fuel for deep-space freighters. One for many, comrade. She is the fucking one!”
There was silence.
“I need you, comrade. I need you to fly the ship up to the freighter, and when we get to wherever we are going, you can cry and wail about how you left a Milpol whore to die, but right now I NEED YOU TO STAY ON FUCKING MISSION! Do – you – fucking – copy?”
His comrade’s finger was now over to trigger, ready to click. His hand aimed the blaster at his comrade’s chest.
He turned, looking out into the darkness.
“I copy,” he said.
His comrade stared at him in the gloom, his finger still on the trigger. “Are you sure?”
“I said I fucking copy,” he said, a tear leaking from his eye, unseen in the darkness, that he quickly wiped away.
His comrade slowly and silently exhaled. His finger moved from the trigger, which he had made safe and tucked into his jacket.
“Okay…” his comrade said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
They covered the bomb with debris and left, moving through the rubble and crumbling polycrete remains of long-abandoned cell blocks, back to their hideout, and down to the sewers.