The Hell With Earthside: A Novella (STRYDER'S HORIZON Book 1) (4 page)

Six years ago. I was standing in Earthside. It had just been built. Many drillers had worked themselves near death to earn the right to live there.  My brother Callum and I had.

He was twenty and I was twenty-four years old. We had signed on with the drillers to pay off the education our parents had tried to provide us with. It was the one favor we could give back to them in hopes they could retire to a place as nice as
Earthside was supposed to be.

I didn’t want to think about it, but I thought about it everyday. Maybe there was one day that went by without me thinking about what happened to my brother. And that’s the day I wish I could remember because whatever happened on that day must’ve been good enough to let me forget.

I tried to focus on the present, on what the officers were doing. I tried to watch their technique and I had them practice with the drill-runners in groups of three. We used the VertDeck to simulate the narrower passageways of the tubes. The drill-runners danced through semi-translucent lines, a loud buzz sounded if they would’ve touched a wall. But there was no real consequence.

That would not be the case in the actual tubes.

From surveillance footage, we had established that the Dessup Gang ran groups of three out in waves. They launched a group every five minutes until twenty-one gang members were in the tubes. It was shortsighted of Colonial Officer Davis to have me only train ten officers. I suppose if the officers were good at what they needed to do, they could take out the groups of three as they came in.

But we hadn’t started combat tactics yet. They had just barely mastered basic steering.

“You don’t look happy,” Gregor said at the end of day seven.

“I’m not. There’s still so much more they have to be able to do. The
Dessup have been running these tubes for months now. They own the place.”

“There’s no proof the
Dessup have weapons they can fire while on the drill-runners.” Gregor told me. “Think about it, no one is supposed to be in the tubes. You can’t be in the tube as a human. And all the drill-runners on this planet should be gone now that the drilling is done.”

“But how do we know?”

Gregor yawned as if he’d been piloting all day instead of sitting around waiting for another repair job.

“Davis runs scans on their drill-runners each time. There are no modifications from the first scan we saw.  They aren’t expecting a fight in the tubes. They are armed, but they are armed for when they get out of the tubes. I know you can’t pull a blaster while you steer a drill-runner.”

“What about the extra hinge in our drill-runners, have you figured out how that will be useful?”

Gregor turned a yawn into a smile.

“That is simple. If we change the pulse sensory to one more command-sensitive we can load each drill-runner with an object, everyday garbage for instance. And with a flick of the wrists the pilot can fling the object at the Dessup. Boom.”

“Everyday garbage isn’t going to go ‘boom.’”

“I know, I figure Davis will have access to the ‘boom.’”

I shook my head, “These guys can barely steer and now you want them to aim with what is basically a catapult? How do they reload?”

Gregor had already noticed the limitation, “Two shots is all they have, ten officers vs. three Dessup. That’s twenty shots at sitting ducks. They reload before the next wave.” Gregor frowned. “You don’t like this ideas?”

I didn’t have any reason not to, no one else had come up with a better idea on how to
weaponize the drill-runners.

Davis didn’t say a word. He handed over the tablet and let it do all the talking. The newscaster was computer-generated and its life-like concern only made the report sadder because it couldn’t show half the emotion a report like this should’ve had. It might as well have been reporting the results of the last Sketherball Tournament.

“Today nineteen individuals were killed by the rampant
Dessup Gang. Three children are also missing following the attack. As this is breaking news we will have more as Colonial officials update us on the results of yet another heinous attack.”

Davis said, “
They’re breathing down my neck. And they aren’t doing enough. They should be strangling me until I have the Dessup Gang caught or killed. We need to be in those tubes yesterday— a week ago. Build me that time machine you were talking about, Stryder.”

I almost gave him an excuse. Instead I explained Gregor’s idea.

Three hours later the bay doors looked like Swiss cheese.

I went to the top of the Colonial tower alone. I think I had wanted to breathe again, but the clouds had stolen the blue sunset and I was left with a view of darkness. So my breath remained stagnant.

Still, I was trying to see something. Almost anything, as if the shadows down below hid some secret to some question I had. And if only that blasted cloud wasn’t in the way the sunset would reveal it to me and then, and only then would I have the peace I’d longed for all my life.

I knew it wasn’t that simple.

Perhaps my reflection was getting in the way. It wasn’t the face I wanted to see, and it wasn’t the conversation I wanted to have. In the reflection you couldn’t see my bad hair day, couldn’t see all the wrinkles I’d failed to correct. I looked six years younger. Exactly six years younger, and I knew that because it was the same sad face I stared at six damn years ago.

I looked like a little bitch.

My brother and I had it all solved. Mom and Dad were paid for. We’d sent the credit. It was the least we could do. I breathed that day. It wasn’t just a sigh it was an exorcism. I’d survived drill running and I had a future paid for, and my parents’ future was paid for.

What did I do wrong?

Did I invite the
Dessup over for a nice shindig where they could crucify my brother? Did I help them pick the best way to peal back some one’s flesh so that they could hang in the air an extra two seconds before splattering across the ground?

No. The only thing I did was
convince my brother that the best celebrations that night would be in Burnside.

That’s where I belonged. Not here in the grand fictional paradise.

“
Kimmie?” Gregor must’ve snuck up on me. I wondered how long he had been standing there. He looked like he had seen the thoughts in my head.

“What?”

“I was just looking for you. You acted rather strange when you left the bay and I thought you might need to talk,” Gregor said.

“I’m fine. It’s just that I worry that they won’t be ready.”

“That’s not your decision to make. Davis makes the call. You’ve done a fantastic job. You know me, I could never pilot a drill-runner and yet you took 10 people. And you turned all ten into pilots that would’ve made the second, third, fourth day maybe. No problem. The veins always had the random pop and burst of hydrogen, but the tubes are pure. You’ve given them a chance they didn’t have before. Those Dessup will have hell to pay.” Gregor tried a smile on me, but had to give up. “Davis wants you to go in there, but it’s not your fight, Kimmie.”

“I think I want it to be my fight.”

“No, Kimmie, it’s not.”

I couldn’t say another word. My mind had a thousand of them on the tip of my tongue. No matter what I said it would be wrong.

Colonial Officer Davis had the officers practicing before I got there. Today was the first day they were going to make a test-run down the tubes. I walked into the bay and was relieved. I
basked in the blue sunset again. The officers worked as a team gliding through the air as calm as a light snow flurry. There was a gentle hissing of the drill-runners as they whisked by each other.  There were obvious differences in some of the officers’ skill levels the more I watched, but for the most part they were all capable of dodging and turning.

They had soft orbs that they tossed at each other to practice aiming. The orbs would hit the drill-runner and burst into confetti. It wasn’t pleasant to stand under, but no one got dead from it.

It blinded me, too. Something about the moment was surreal.  It looked more like we were practicing for a New Year’s Eve party rather than to kill a ruthless gang of killers and thieves. It took minutes to come up with something to say, even though it was forced I finally said, “Looking pretty good, we’ll have to see how they handle the tubes.”

“Pretty good? They’re ready,” Davis said. “You did it,
Stryder.”

“Haven’t done it yet, the
Dessup Gang is still out there.”

“Not for long,” Davis grinned.

I was dumb enough to believe him. His confidence was infectious and when the officers ran the tubes perfect, there was nothing stopping Davis from ordering our first patrol.

I didn’t sleep that night. I tossed and turned, and didn’t know why for hours. My mind ran circles around what was actually bothering me. And that was the impending guilt I knew would belong to me if the officers failed.

And by failed I meant died.

I found myself back in the bay alone except for the glow of the surveillance footage. I watched how swiftly the
Dessup Gang adjusted as the tubes directed flow of whatever resource I was seeing. You could see the demand thrusting a wall of water and the three drill-runners cut just in the nick of time. They were going as fast as they could.

“You’re setting off alarms,” Gregor said behind me. I was too tired to be startled. Plus there was nothing in Gregor’s nature that scared me. He was kind and gentle, dirty and lazy were his faults.  He eased into a chair next to me. He smelled of coffee, he wasn’t drinking any, but he was definitely perspiring.

“You’re up late,” I said.

“I should say the same thing, but maybe you have better reason than I. I have been trying to fix a few of your pupils’ rides.” He smiled
and said, “Relax, just wear and tear. They don’t know how to pilot them efficiently yet, lots of jerky movement. You were like that once.”

“They’re not ready.”

Gregor shrugged. “Davis thinks they are.”

I shrugged back. “Maybe. No. I don’t know. I mean they’ve had a little over a week’s wo
rth of training and the Dessup Gang has how long? Just because they started causing havoc three months ago doesn’t mean they just started three months ago. Look at how fluid they move. They work as a team.”

“Like they are communicating.”

“Exactly.”
Exactly!
I rewound the footage. It was clear two of the Dessup were following the third, reacting as he reacted.

“What is it,
Kimmie?”

“Davis thinks the
Dessup have the plans to the tubes and are using them to be anywhere they want to be. But what if they don’t? What if they don’t have a map at all? The attacks so far have been completely random. What if this is out of necessity rather than just criminal sadism?”

“So they don’t know where they are going?”

“No, that means they are far better pilots than we’re giving them credit for. We assumed they were memorizing the plans and executing paths they knew beforehand.”

I watched hours of footage. It only seemed more plausible.

David arrived first thing in the morning. I still hadn’t slept and hadn’t lost the edge of my discovery.

“Do you see?”

Davis ran the footage back a couple times. “This gives us a very distinct advantage.”

“What?”

“If they don’t know where they are going then rather than face them head on, we need to direct them to where we will have the high ground. It doesn’t matter how ready our officers are then.”

“I don’t think you get it. If they are doing all of this at random then they can out pilot our guys.”

“Stryder, listen to me when I tell you this. This is coming down from above. We need to be ready. I have seen what you have done with these guys and they are ready. Now you bring this to me, and it doesn’t tell me we’re in trouble because they don’t have a map. That’s an added relief.  If we can pick up on where they are in the tubes and create the correct scenarios, then we can put them exactly where we want them to be.”

“
Just give me a couple more days. Gregor has said it himself during the maintenance on the drill-runners. The officers are still jerking them around too much. They have to move smoother if they are going to stand up against even an equal number of Dessup.”

Davis shook his head and stopped the footage.

“Do you watch the news briefs at night? Did you catch last nights? Did you not see that they murdered a mother of three? Every day, every hour we wait, we’re putting one more life at risk. It’s adding up, Stryder, and I don’t want any more on my conscience.”

“It’s just—

“Stryder. I appreciate the assistance you have provided the Colonials with, you will be rewarded as you requested.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re done here. Thank you.”

“Just give me today. Give them one more day. You’ll need that to set up your trap won’t you?”

The fact that Davis didn’t say anything meant he knew I was right. I’d have one more day to try and whip the officers into better shape. It wouldn’t be enough. I knew that. But it might give them better odds.

Then the words came out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop them, but they are what I wanted to say.

“Let me go with them.”

Davis’ eyebrow peaked. He looked pleased and disappointed and said, “It’s too late for that. I can’t get another one in time. I appreciate you finally volunteering but you can sit this one out with me.”

“But if anything goes wrong, the Dessup will know you know they are using the tubes. They’ll adjust their strategy. They’ll retaliate.”

“That’s why this has to work. Now let me do my job. Get them ready.” He stormed out of the bay.

I was left with the officers. I felt like I was wasting time settling my pounding heart, but my mind couldn’t come down. I couldn’t give them the order to start running routes. When I finally did I gave them no urgency and they took to the drill-runners just as passively.  I could see they were tired.

It was all going to be my fault.

And I didn’t do anything else to stop it. Davis set up a trap and like proud parents we all gathered around the feed to watch it play out.