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

  If I wanted to get my chance to be free again, I had to play along. So I ate, choking down each flavorless bite. I stayed alive.

  On the last day of my captivity I heard the boots in the hallway, like usual, and waited for the food tray to slide through. I may not like the menu but at least eating gave me something to do.

  But this time, no food tray. This time, the door slid open on its track and I jumped up off the cot, expecting the First Marshall coming back to question me again.

  Only, it wasn’t him. It was the Enforcer from before with his thin face and washed-out eyes. He stepped in, and I knew something was wrong.

  “Where’s First Marshall Blake?” I asked him.

  He took his time answering. Before he did, he reached back around the doorframe and punched in a code in the control pad.

  The door swished closed.

  My eyebrows tried to climb up my forehead. “What are you doing?” The moron had just locked us both in here. There was no way to open the door from the inside…

  “Don’t worry, little girl,” he laughed at me. “Enforcers have a remote for the doors. Not that you’d know anything about that since you didn’t graduate up to the Eccoliculum.”

  “I did so!” I snapped at him. Why did I care what he thought? It didn’t take me long to figure that one out. I couldn’t care less what this stupeheaded bastard thought of me. Except, it mattered to me that people knew I had passed my classes, passed the Ceremony. I was a full member of the Colony now, and I was two years away from becoming an Enforcer. It mattered to me that people knew that. It mattered a lot.

  “Heh.” The Enforcer shrugged and pulled out a manacle strap from the back of his utility belt. “Got some fire in you, don’t you? Guess that’s why he likes you so much. Come with me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Slapping the manacle strap against his palm made it curl on both ends, ready to bind my wrists together. “First Marshall Blake left instructions this morning. You’re to be moved.”

  “Moved?” There was only two places to go from Isolation. Back home, to the barracks with the other 26ers… or to Quarantine. “Moved where? What instructions? Why isn’t he here?”

  “Calm it down, kid. I said Blake likes it when people stick up for themselves. Doesn’t mean I do.”

  “You’re going to answer my questions, right now,” I heard myself shouting, even as I backed up another step to find the wall against my back, “or I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  His face took on a scowl. “You’ll go where you’re told, when you’re told. You’re a citizen of this Colony. I’m an Enforcer. My word is law.”

  His hand went to another pouch on his belt, and for a moment I was sure he was going to pull out one of the many tools Enforcers carried to compel people to follow the rules. Pain compliance was always the Enforcers’ go-to response. Up until now, I had always thought it made perfect sense. They had to defend the Colony, so they should be able to use whatever means they wanted to.

  It all looked different, standing on this side of things.

  He let his fingers drop away from his belt, his expression changing back to a smirk. “You won’t be any kind of trouble. You’re just all mouth. You need to be taught some manners, is all.”

  His free hand came up to brush at my cheek, and then down the slope of my shoulder. I turned my head away and lifted my arms across my chest defensively, but where was I supposed to go? I was trapped in this room with him.

  Now that sure raised a bunch of uncomfortable images to my mind.

  His hand… felt its way down my chest, and his smirk became wicked, and I stood there, frozen, like the scared little child he thought I was.

  For the space of five heartbeats.

  “Yes,” he said to me. “I’ve got time to teach you a few lessons, little girl.”

  Then this calm came over me, and my mind went blank, and it was like I was reacting without thinking.

  Just like I did before.

  I looked up into his eyes, and he smiled down into mine… until he blinked.

  He must have seen something in my expression that warned him.

  It didn’t do him any good.

  My hand flashed out from where I had it held close to my body, a short strike that took him in the solar plexus, the life force chakra, one of the forty-one weak points our training taught us to focus on in a fight.

  In rapid succession, I struck twelve others on his body.

  The last one was a cymbal-clap strike to both ears. When a man’s eardrums pop, it’s so painful that it can cause temporary unconsciousness. I knew all that. I knew the facts from my lessons, knew the physical steps from our kata trainings. I knew all of that.

  What I didn’t know was how I managed to be so damned good at it.

  The Enforcer—I never did know his name—crumpled to the floor at my feet. I liked him there. It felt right, to have this man who had threatened to force himself on me laying helpless in front of me.

  “Serves you right.”

  Was that my voice? I sounded like someone else. Someone who enjoyed causing pain.

  Guess I’d grown up more than I realized.

  Was that really me?

  Running a hand through my hair and taking a long breath, I reminded myself I didn’t have time for introspection. I had to move, now, if I was going to get out of here. The Enforcer would wake up any minute and even if he didn’t there would be others who came to check on me and it wasn’t going to do me any good to be found like this.

  Quarantine, I reminded myself. Blake already wanted to send me to Quarantine.

  If they found out I’d just beat up an Enforcer, they might just skip ahead to the part where they kill people who were infectious.

  Because the kind of disease Blake saw in me wasn’t physical. It was a way of thinking that he didn’t like. One he was afraid would spread to everyone in the Colony. If I taught people to be more concerned about their friends than the good of the Colony, where would that lead? Anarchy. People would start thinking for themselves, and the Enforcers wouldn’t have the absolute hold on us that they did now.

  I had always thought that was best for the Colony. Now, I was beginning to question things.

  That’s what Blake was really afraid of. That’s why he had me in here.

  It was also why he was going to move me from here to somewhere else.

  No way was I going to let that happen.

  Chapter 5 - Failure

  The remote control device for the door was right on the Enforcer’s belt, just like he said it would be. Just one button. Once I pushed it and the door opened I scrunched myself up in the corner of the room, waiting for someone to rush in and see the fallen Enforcer and shout an alarm.

  No one came in. Hesitantly I pushed my head outside. The hallway was empty.

  I almost smiled to myself until I looked back and saw my handiwork in the blood and bruises on the man’s face.

  Nothing to smile about here. I was so screwed.

  Outside in the hall I shut the door again and took just a moment to pop the cover off the control panel and disable it by snapping one of the wires off its lead. Then I replaced the cover, and no one would know the difference unless they looked closely. It would buy me some time, anyway.

  The remote door control went into the hip pocket of my jumpsuit.

  Somehow the silence in the medical center spooked me more than if there had been a dozen armed Enforcers out here to meet me. I stood where I was, looking up and down the hall, at all the other identical doors just like the one I had just sealed shut. Would Saskia be here? Or was she already in Quarantine?

  Days. I’d been in that room for days. Anything could have happened to her by now. And what about the other 26ers? What did they think about me? Did they think I was diseased? Dead?

  I knew one thing for sure. I had to get back to them. Had to tell them what had happened to Saskia. We could figure out what to do together. We were a group. Friends. No, more than fri
ends. Family. We were the 26ers, and if anyone was going to help me and protect me from a Quarantine I didn’t need to go into, it was going to be them.

  I had to get out of here. I had to get to them.

  What about Saskia, a little voice in the back of my head nagged. What about your friend?

  Shut up, I told myself. I’d failed her enough as it was. There was nothing I could do for her now. I could search the entire medical facility, one room at a time, and definitely get caught, or I could escape and get help.

  I went for help.

  At the very first door that led outside I pushed with my shoulder against the crash bar, hoping there wouldn’t be an alarm but not caring one way or the other. I just needed to get out of here. The sun beat down from a clear sky and trees waved in the breeze here at the back of the building. Now that was some kind of luck. I could have ended up out front, where there were bound to be Enforcers and security cameras and doctors and nurses. Here I could leave unnoticed. Here, I was relatively safe.

  Up ahead there would be the running path that led back to our barracks, and the 26ers, and help. Finally, something was going my way.

  “Stop there!” a voice shouted at me. “Raise your hands and come toward us!”

  So much for safe, relatively or otherwise.

  I raised my arms, interlacing my fingers behind my head, as that same eerie calm started to descend over me. With a breath, everything became crystal clear. I knew, as I descended the slope step by step, that I was going to kill someone. I saw the silhouette of two men, at the edge of the trail, both of them holding magnetic acoustic resonators. The sleek rifles with the cylindrical ends gleamed a metallic silver. Beautiful, and non-lethal. Why just MARs? Wouldn’t the Enforcers have something deadlier to come after me with than a weapon designed to stun someone?

  Looking closer at the two, I found my answer.

  “Era!” It was Verne, smiling his moronic smile. “And here I’d been thinking you were weak and diseased. I figured you for the incinerator!”

  He laughed, and when he did the kid next to him laughed along with him. Augustus was a huge bear, with frizzy black hair that framed a heavy face the color of roasted coffee. He was great at the physical parts of training and slow at the rest of it but mostly, he was a follower. He’d do whatever the rest of the group was doing without a whole lot of thought as to why.

  Both of them were wearing the new uniforms, gray with black stripes. They were one step closer to being Enforcers. I hadn’t gotten my uniform yet, because of the trap Blake had laid out for me. Would I ever get to wear that uniform now?

  I started to relax, the reflex to kill evaporating as I realized that here was the help I’d been looking for. My classmates. My friends. I needed to tell them about what had happened to me, and to Saskia, and…

  Wait.

  “What did you say to me, Verne?”

  Under my glare, he fidgeted, the barrel of the MAR lowering to aim at the ground. August let his drop as well when he saw Verne doing it. “Look, Era,” Verne said. “I had to tell First Marshall Blake what I saw you doing. You sounded sick. Like there was something wrong. I mean you were out of control, Era! You nearly killed me with that knife, and then you didn’t come to classes. You weren’t yourself!”

  Maybe I was going to kill someone after all. This stupehead was why I’d been in Isolation for days on end and the reason why I didn’t know where they’d taken Saskia. “Verne, you have no idea what you’ve done. None! What are you doing out here, anyway? What, you two boys playing at being real Enforcers or something?”

  “Shows what you know,” Verne griped. “This is a real training exercise. You’d know that, if you’d gone to your classes like you were supposed to!”

  “Yeah,” Augustus said, nodding his head along with every word Verne said.

  “See, Era, we’re guarding this section behind the medical facility. Heather and Thillip are further back doing recon. Yeah, see? You don’t know anything. The Enforcers put the whole Academy on patrol. There’s some dangerous type running around the island. That’s what we’ve been told. Possibly trying to break into or out of… the medical facility…”

  His eyes got very big, and as his jaw dropped I heard the tiniest squeak come out of his mouth.

  “What?” Augustus asked. “What is it?”

  Verne brought his MAR up at me, firing once by reflex, blasting a furrow into the soft dirt at my feet. The impact of the sonic weapon tossed leaves and tiny twigs up into the air to the sound of a barely audible PHOOF. As the wide, round end of his weapon centered on me, I reacted.

  A kick sent the rifle bucking up in his hands to slam into his own face. I heard the crack of his nose breaking over the sound of the MAR expending another blast harmlessly into the air. PHOOF.

  He dropped the gun, holding his face in both hands. “Hellfire, Era! That hurts!”

  I turned on Augustus, hands up and bladed, ready to strike.

  He dropped his gun, put his hands in the air, and shook his head. “I like my nose.”

  I think I would have laughed, if his shoulder hadn’t suddenly exploded in a spray of blood.

  The echoing rapport of a single shot was muffled by the trees around us, and by a whirring hum like helicopter blades hovering in place. An antigrav drive.

  Augustus’s face lost some of its color as he looked down at his arm hanging limp and bloody, a hole torn into his gray jumpsuit. “Ouch,” he said. Just that.

  Then he fell over backward to the ground like a broken tree.

  I turned around, looking for the direction the shot had come in, and centered in on the weird sound that was growing louder.

  A hovering, metal object wove its way through the trees. Gold, round on top, its body tapered down a foot and a half to a pointed tip. Pincer arms and metal appendages stuck out from all sides. A series of electronic eyes ringed a section toward the top.

  I recognized several of the appendages. Ballistic weapons. MARs. Something I was sure was a laser cutter modified with a beam stabilizer that basically turned the thing into a surgical death ray.

  I’d never seen anything like this before. Even so, there was no mistaking its purpose.

  “What in Creation is that!” Verne blurted out. To tell you the truth I’d forgotten about him. Now I reacted again, throwing myself to the right and barreling into him, knocking him off his feet and to the ground, sending us both tumbling down the hillside to where we at least had a little bit of cover from the metal assassin.

  FZZZZT! There was a breath of air as something flashed over our heads, hitting the bark of a nearby tree with a loud WHUMP.

  “Keep your head down!” I ordered him.

  “What is it?” he asked again, his voice pinched and nasally, his face already turning black and blue where the MAR had struck him.

  “It doesn’t matter what it is,” I hissed, “now shut up!”

  “Of course it matters!” He was nearly hysterical. “We need to know what it is! We need to know what it is if we’re going to fight it!”

  “Fine!” I all but shouted at him, losing my temper. “It’s a floating metal death machine. I think its name is Fluffy! Happy?”

  The whirring was right above us now, up the slope, and I saw Verne’s eyes get so wide I could clearly see the whites all around. No time, no cover, no weapons. Great.

  Then I remembered what Verne always carried with him. Lunging at him I reached behind his waist, my hand grabbing hold of the knife he always had on him, pulling it and turning with it before he even had time to object.

  I threw the knife at Fluffy.

  It struck, tip first, and bounced off the metal carapace.

  Hellfire.

  It was the laser port that aimed at me, and when it did I cringed, ready to jump out of the way and knowing, even as I did, that it would be too late.

  The sound of an MAR going off was almost lost behind the noise of Fluffy’s antigrav drive, but it was there, and then the metal death machine was explod
ing into pieces that shattered down around our heads. The main part of the body fell to the ground like a stone, and buried itself into the soil.

  Looking back up the slope, I saw Augustus. He’d crawled forward on his belly with one good arm, aimed his weapon, and taken the thing down with a single shot.

  Color me impressed.

  Verne too, I guess. “Era,” he said, putting his hand back over his face. “What is going on? Did we really get called out to stop… you?”

  “Yes, you dickering stupehead! Look, we can’t stay here. They’ll know we destroyed their robot, plus I think that thing had cameras on it. Probably broadcasting back to the Monitoring Station. We have to—”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you!” he blurted, a bubble of snotty blood bursting out from under his hand. “What did you do, Era?”

  “Nothing!” I protested immediately, although that wasn’t quite true. “It’s just… I saw Saskia, Verne. In the medical facility. She was cut up bad.”

  “You saw her?” His face went pale behind the darkening bruise. “You’re insane! You could have gotten yourself ill! She’s infectious! I knew I was right to tell the First Marshall about you!”

  He started back up the hill to where Augustus lay, panting, his eyes dazed. I followed him, hoping to convince him of what I’d seen.

  “You don’t understand. There’s something wrong. She was only burned, Verne! People get burned in the Ceremony all the time. That doesn’t earn them a trip to Quarantine! That doesn’t get them cut open!”

  “Will you stop talking nonsense and help me with Augustus?” he demanded, snuffing. “Are you saying Saskia had surgery? Don’t be stupid. She got sent to Quarantine. It’s all over the Colony. They don’t waste surgery supplies on someone in Quarantine.”

  I kept myself from smacking him in his broken nose again. Just barely.

  Kneeling down to check out the wound in Augustus’s shoulder, I could see how bad it was. “Look, Verne, go get help for him. I’m going to go back and tell the other 26ers what I saw. They need to know something bad is going on. I don’t know what, but if you could have seen what they did to her, Verne…”