Colony 41: Volume 1 (The Era Rae Series) Read online

  When I left Colony 41, it wasn’t exactly under good circumstances. First Marshall Blake was dead, and everyone knew I was to blame. I had to leave in a hurry. All I’d had with me was the clothes on my back and a stun pistol I took off an unsuspecting Enforcer on my way out.

  I didn’t get far. Out past the wall around our Colony, sure, but only because I had hitched a ride on that supply ship. They had just dropped their shipment to Colony 41 when I snuck on board and hid myself in the cargo hold. When they finally discovered me we were out in deep water with no chance of going back. I wasn’t safe, though. They confiscated my stun pistol. They used leather straps to bind my wrists and feet. The captain of that ship made it very clear that I was going to be turned back over to the Restored Society as soon as we set anchor in the next Colony.

  He also made it clear to his crew that I might need to be taught a lesson for stowing away on his ship. The form that lesson was going to take couldn’t have been any clearer. Every man in the crew argued over which one would “teach” me first.

  So I broke one man’s collar bone, another man’s wrist, and severed the tendon in another’s leg, all so I could jump overboard and take my chances at sea. Some of the villagers here in Refuge found me, beaten up by the endless waves of the ocean, dehydrated, exhausted, and cut up pretty badly by the sharp rocks of the shoreline. My blood had been turning the water pink, or so I was told.

  Jadran has such a way with words.

  Before I jumped ship, though, I managed to take a few things that I thought might come in handy.

  It was all in the box now. It wasn’t much. A stiletto, the thin metal tube holding one hundred metal spike needles loaded with a synthetic venom that could eat into flesh like acid. A small pack of dried bread, useless now after all the water exposure. The remains of my green and black jumpsuit from the Colony, torn and bloodied.

  And a com device.

  This was all I had left from my former life. No vid stills of my friends. None of my stones, collected painstakingly from every place on the island of Colony 41 where I had done a training exercise. Just these few things, stolen from a crew that had wanted to turn me over to the Restored Society for the reward.

  I strapped the com device to my wrist. It was slim and small against the back of my forearm. Not as sophisticated as the wristcoms the Enforcers used, but it would pick up signals broadcast on a wide range of frequencies. It would allow me to transmit, too, but if the Enforcers knew I was listening in on them then they could backtrack the signal to locate me. If I was going to do this, I needed to be stealthy and stay hidden.

  I’d made my decision. Staying in Refuge wasn’t an option. None of these people knew what was coming for them. I did. Which made me the only one who could stop it.

  I couldn’t stay, but I wasn’t running either. Not exactly.

  Examining the little stiletto, I frowned. What was I going to do, stop an incursion force with my little venom spikes? Recently I discovered exactly how good I was at hand-to-hand combat. I think the term I used earlier was unstoppable? Well. Even an unstoppable force can be taken out when it runs up against too many immovable objects.

  In other words, I needed some real weapons if this was going to work. Wonder what Jadran has laying around?

  I went through the storage shelves in the room here first. Food preserves, sacks of root vegetables. Spare clothes folded into neat stacks. Just what I thought. In the kitchen I found an assortment of forks and knives. The forks were polished wood. A few of them were made from some smooth, white material that took me a moment to identify as bone. Yuck.

  All the knives were dull or chipped. Not even worth my time. I’d be better off with a sharpened stick.

  The front room was where the fireplace stood cold and swept clean in these warmer months. I imagined it blazing brightly for winter and the image made me smile as I thought of Jadran and his friends sitting around it, telling stories and laughing.

  Then the image turned bitter as I remembered another fire, the one from my graduation ceremony, where Saskia had been burned. That one moment would be forever blazed into my mind. It was the turning point of my life. That fire. Those flames.

  I turned away from the fireplace and searched the shelves on the wall.

  There were books here. Some of them were leftovers from before the Event. Old and weathered relics of another time. Others had crudely bound leather covers with rough paper pages in between. I leafed through a few of them and saw Jadran’s strong, blocky handwriting. Journals. Handwritten accounts of things that had happened to him, thoughts on everything from gardening to the way the Elders ruled. Interesting.

  The next one I opened had several drawings, done by hand. I saw trees, and birds, and a few animals I couldn’t identify. Jadran had drawn these? The detail was amazing. The way he shaded the images made them almost seem alive.

  On one page I saw a very detailed picture of Laria’s pretty face, smiling, her eyes reaching out to me from the paper.

  I turned to the next drawing.

  And stopped.

  It was a technical sketch of an MAR. The Magnetic Acoustic Resonators used by the Enforcers. Sleek, beautiful, and non-lethal. Jadran had captured every line of the weapon, with cutaways detailing the inner mechanisms and the wiring and even the energy capsule.

  I ran my hands over the lines of the drawing. How? Somebody who had grown up on a farming village on the edges of the Outlands shouldn’t know anything about MARs. Well. He might know they exist and what they do and maybe even how they work, but to know this kind of detail…

  I’d learned how to break down an MAR and put it back together as a Senior alumni in the Academy, and I couldn’t give this kind of detail.

  Closing the book I put it back up on the shelf. These questions weren’t going to help me get what I needed and then get out of the village any faster.

  The next book was smaller than the others, and blank. After turning it over in my hands I slipped it into the bag I was, um, borrowing to hold my things. I liked the idea of writing my thoughts down. It might help me to figure things out, if I could see what I was thinking.

  There were other things on the shelves. Colorful rocks. A few seashells shaped into useful items like the hairpin Laria wore. I tried not to make a connection there but it was hard not to.

  So maybe Jadran and Laria were a thing. More than friends, no matter what Jadran had said—or wasn’t saying. Why should that bother me? I already told him I’m not interested.

  Sure.

  As I was about to turn away from the shelves I saw a machete hanging on the wall. It was a decent metal blade, as long as my forearm and just as wide, with an edge that pricked against my finger when I tried it. The handle was wrapped in twine, which made it easy to grip. I’d seen it hanging here before, of course, but I never thought of it as a weapon. Unless I was about to be attacked by trees.

  Beggars can’t be choosers. A lesson from the Academy came back to me. When you’re desperate, use whatever you can find.

  A stiletto, a machete, and the skills written into my DNA’s code. I’d say I was pretty desperate.

  “That was my father’s.”

  I turned at the sound of Jadran’s voice. He was just inside the door, holding it open as he stood there watching me, the dying light from the late afternoon sun casting him in shadow. I couldn’t read his expression.

  “The machete,” he pointed. “That was my father’s. It’s all I have left of him.”

  I held it up, turning it from side to side. I could see the age in the way the metal had tarnished, the way the twine around the handle had been restrung again and again. But unlike the knives in the kitchen, Jadran had taken care with this blade. It had been routinely sharpened. Maybe even polished. It was more than just a big knife. It was a memento from his past.

  Letting the tip drop I held the handle out to him. “Sorry. I was…”

  “Looking for something?” He shut the door, leaning back against it, folding his arm
s.

  “Jadran, I have to go. The Enforcers aren’t leaving. They’ll rally together and come at Refuge as one big group. It’s what they do. You don’t know their tactics, the way they think. I do. They will come, they will be ruthless, and they will…”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You know? Jadran… if you know, why don’t you tell the Elders? We have to warn the village. We have to get everyone to safety.”

  He looked down at his machete again. “My father showed me how to use that when I was a child. Then I left. I was gone for a long time. It was here waiting for me, when I came back. My father was not.” With a shrug and a heavy sigh, he met my eyes again. “I tried to warn them, Era Rae. I told the Elders everything you just said, in almost the same words. Interested in listening to me, they are not. Sometimes it is hard to convince people of things they do not want to know.”

  For a moment I was at a loss for words. If the Elders wouldn’t listen, if they wouldn’t tell the people to prepare or take them to these caves everyone kept talking about, then I didn’t have a chance of getting them to listen to me.

  “I have to go,” I told him again.

  After a moment, he nodded. “I know. I knew it from the moment you washed up on our shores, that you would leave us one day. I have asked you to stay, to consider staying with me, but I knew. It was too much to hope for. You are an exciting woman, Era Rae. You can not blame a man for hoping to have more time with you.”

  “Jadran…” So many emotions, so many things to say. We’d grown close while I was laying in his bed. Um, on the cot. In the back room. That bed. That’s what I meant. I owed him my life, more or less.

  I just couldn’t give him my heart.

  Without another word he stepped aside to open the door again. “Go, Era Rae. Do what you have to.”

  The few steps between me and him seemed like the longest distance ever. When I offered him the machete again, he shook his head. “Keep it. Do what you have to.”

  I wanted to say something profound. Something meaningful. Instead I just shouldered my pack and held the machete closer to my side so it wouldn’t be so obvious on my way through the village. Then I walked out into the coming night.

  “Come back to me,” I heard Jadran say to me as I walked away.

  Part II

  Chapter 3 - Fight

  I moved swiftly between tall, yellow-brown trees with teardrop shaped leaves, and others with spreading branches and white flowers and bark that bit into my hands as I made my way carefully at sunset. The wind blew through my hair as I went.

  I didn’t know the names of the trees. The beauty and diversity of nature hadn’t been part of our course list back at the Academy. I don’t know if maybe the Colony people who studied the healing arts or food preparation or whatever learned about trees. Me and the other 26ers didn’t. Things like that don’t matter to an Enforcer.

  Being able to move quickly and silently, to sneak up on an enemy without being seen, that mattered to us. I would never be an Enforcer. Not now.

  But I could use what they gave me.

  A person can travel overland at an average speed of five kilometers an hour, give or take. Faster, if they do more than walk. I wasn’t exactly walking. The bag of my supplies banged rhythmically against my back. The machete hung from my belt. I moved like lives depended on me. Because they did.

  An hour and a half later, just as the sun was turning orange over the tops of the trees, I could see the Enforcer encampment not far off. Lights. Vehicles moving slowly back and forth. The noise of men and women and equipment.

  Overhead, two HoverHawks floated in stationary position. The “flyers” that Ethyline had seen. They were black, flat rectangles the size of small houses, with four rotating cylinders at each corner. Antigrav engines. They allowed the HoverHawks to move like soaring birds. They carried up to a dozen men.

  And, they were heavily armored.

  The HoverHawks were a quiet thrum reverberating through the night. That, and the general noise of the camp, covered the sounds of my approach.

  Jadran was right. Scary, how close his words had been to my own thoughts. I was never going to stay in the village. I didn’t belong there. That kind of peaceful existence was not for me. I needed to act. I needed to do something.

  I needed to stop the Enforcers from hurting these people.

  Closer and closer I crept, through the night, from tree to tree, from shadow to shadow. They had cleared away a large area of the forest to set up their camp. We weren’t at the coastline anymore, I realized. How far inland had they come already? These were the Outlands. What hadn’t been reclaimed by nature, like the area here around Refuge, was still toxic and radioactive and deadly. None of that would stop the Enforcers. What they couldn’t control, they would simply obliterate.

  How many villages had they already marched through? What had happened to those places, I wondered? Probably the same thing that had happened to the Freemen who tried to stop them.

  Nothing stopped the Enforcers. It was suicide to even try.

  A grim smile crossed my face. So here I was, on a suicide run. I knew I could take out a lot of them. Kill a dozen of them. Maybe more. But in the end, more Enforcers would come, and I’d be dead. No. Fighting wasn’t the way. Not this time.

  If I could find proof that they were going to march on Refuge, then I could warn the people there. I could do what Jadran had failed to do and convince the Elders that the people were in danger.

  I needed to know what the Enforcers had planned.

  The sentries were walking a standard decagon pattern. It’s pretty effective, but I’d had the same training they did. I knew where each of them would be at every step and I slipped past without them ever knowing. If I was really lucky, they weren’t scanning the trees for heat signatures.

  If they were, this was going to go very sideways very fast.

  Machete in one hand, stiletto in the other, I went as far as the edge of the trees, and watched.

  The camp was laid out pretty much just like I expected it to be. I wasn’t far from the main tent. That’s where the commanders would be, planning and directing the action. I doubted they would launch an offensive at night, in the dark. The preferred method was to march into a village in daylight and give the people the opportunity to surrender to the greater good of the Restored Society… by taking down the leaders as a show of force. Better to do that in the light, where everyone could see it. Fear was their preferred motivator.

  Focus, I told myself.

  A four-wheeled mini vehicle was about to drive by my position, between me and the command tent. I tracked everyone’s movements around me. Once the four-wheeler was past there would be a gap of time when no one was looking my way. Four seconds. Maybe five.

  The lights from the mini vehicle blazed bright as it drove by me and then I pushed out from my hiding space, diving and rolling for cover, landing in a crouch in a deep pool of shadows cast by a stack of supply crates.

  Three seconds. Plenty of time.

  The wounds on my left side hitched and pulled. It hurt, but it was only pain. I pressed a hand there and used a simple breathing technique to slow down my heart. Then I listened.

  It didn’t take long to make out voices from the other side of the heavy burlap tent. Two men. One woman. I didn’t recognize them but there was no reason I should. There were thousands of Enforcers, spread out across the world, and the chances of me running into someone I knew, even this close to Colony 41, wasn’t great.

  “The columns are ready?” one of the men said. “They know the attack vectors?”

  “Yes, Third Marshall,” the second man answered.

  My eyes widened in the dark. A Third Marshall? Here? That was some serious rank to throw at one tiny village.

  Unless Refuge wasn’t their only goal here. Columns, the Third Marshall had said. That was a group of forty Enforcers. I’d only counted a few dozen on my way in here. Apparently, that was only a small part of the force now surr
ounding me. A Third Marshall. Columns of Enforcers. Two HoverHawks.

  What was their real objective?

  “We’ve already begun forming up,” I heard the woman saying. “The advance will begin on your command, Third Marshall.”

  Breathing techniques be damned, because my heart was kicking hard in my chest. They were nearly ready to begin. I had no time to waste. No time to get my proof to show the Elders.

  They were just going to have to trust me.

  “You’re sure your intelligence is accurate?” the Third Marshall asked the female officer.

  “Of course,” she almost purred. “I live to serve, Amicus.”

  I racked my brain. Third Marshall Amicus. I didn’t know the name. I committed it to memory, and then turned back toward the forest, watching for my chance to slip through again.

  “You live to serve the Restored Society,” Third Marshall Amicus corrected the woman in the tent. “We hold the future in our hands. We strive against the darkness. We carry the hopes of all.”

  The three sentences that made up the oath of the Enforcers. The words I had shouted so proudly at my graduation.

  Memories threatened to overwhelm me until I pushed them aside.

  The opening I needed was almost here and I tensed to jump out from my hiding spot.

  “What of our target?” the Third Marshall asked.

  I hesitated, wanting to hear what this target was.

  “She is there,” the other man in the tent said. “My sources confirm it.”

  She. She is there.

  They were talking about me.

  Open mouthed, I looked around me at the manpower and tech gathered in this camp. This could not all be to recapture me. I don’t care how badly I’d hurt the Restored Society. They wouldn’t send this kind of force after just one girl. They might send a Monitor, a single agent, but not this many people and resources.

  I had to wonder, again, what the real objective was here. Not me. Not the little community of Refuge.

  What?