Molly
Kolvin’s eyes shift from the left screen to the right and back again, too rapidly for his mind to process the alternating images. Slow down, he tells himself. Breathe deeply. He recognizes the anxiety attack, he’s suffered them before in stress conditions. The problem is hyperventilation, more than anything. It’s this forest: something about it rattles him, something that doesn’t seem to bother the younger soldiers.
He focuses on monitor one, which tracks his squad as they spread out up the canyon. The spy drone, with its motion-sensitive cameras, hovers silently eight meters above the lead man, high enough to follow the movement of the two targets, and to keep an accurate position on each of the seven men in the squad. They were boys really, just turned seventeen and fearless, the way young boys are. That would be sixteen Earth years, he thinks, too young to be out here on their own. The targets are not armed, as far as Kolvin knows, but it isn’t the targets that worry him, it’s the hostiles in the forest, whomever or whatever attacked Outpost 47 two weeks ago. That’s where monitor two comes in—it watches his ass. But the drones have their limitations, and that magnifies his fear.
The forward camera on monitor one shifts rapidly, showing movement up a deep ravine. Kolvin touches his com switch. “Target to your right, thirty degrees, forty-five meters. Acknowledge.”
“Ack,” comes the reply. “Closing in on Target.”
“Once you have them, get back here pronto, Cooper,” he says.
“Will do. Almost have them, Sarge.”
—
“See this blaze?” Young Molly Whitedeer pointed out a healed-over scar on the tree trunk, and her nephew Joey nodded. “See how it’s pointed like an arrow? If you follow the arrow, there is a big pine tree, taller than the other trees. Do you see it?”
“Yeah,” said her nephew, nodding again.
“That’s where we’ll find the next mark.”
“What if it gets hit by lightning?”
“If I don’t see a marker tree, then I’ll look for a lightning strike, I guess. It hasn’t happened yet.”
Molly pushed aside the thick undergrowth, stepped over a fallen branch, and headed off toward the next marker.
“Molly, why did they send us up here to stay with Aunt Bridge this winter?”
“Joey, we’ve been through this before. You’re mom and dad thought we’d be safer up here, with all the recent raids on the upper settlements. You know that. You’ve asked me that same question a dozen times.”
“Yeah, I know, but I still don’t understand. Why are they attacking us?”
“Because they want to control us before we’re able to defend ourselves,” said Molly. “They’re afraid we may be rivals for natural resources.”
“You said that before, but why do they need so much?”
“You should listen to your mother more often, and study your history, then you’d understand that there are just people like that. Even when they have it all, it won’t be enough—they’re never satisfied.”
“Is my grandmother one of those people?” He was speaking of Jolene Cheng, head of security for the New America Corporation, whom the children had met only once, a few years before.
“Yes.” She caught herself before repeating, you know that. The boy was only trying to understand. They had been too sheltered, and it was difficult for him—for both of them—to accept the changes of the last few months.
“What happens if we get home and they’ve killed everybody or something?”
“Joey, don’t talk like that. There’s no point in getting yourself all worked up before we’re there. I’m sure the adults can take care of themselves. There are nearly five hundred people in Meadow Springs, and they have an armory if they need it.”
“Okay,” said the boy, but he didn’t looked convinced. Neither was Molly, but she wasn’t going to let him know that fact.
The children pushed on through the dense wilderness in silence, until Joey tapped her shoulder and whispered, “Molly.”
“Can we change the subject, Joey?” She winced at her snapped reply.
“I think I heard something.”
Molly stopped in her tracks. Somewhere behind them, to the left, a branch snapped. Then another one on the right. Molly’s heart raced as she quickly sought her bearing. She pointed at a steep canyon ahead on the left.
“Up there,” she whispered fiercely. “Go.”
—
On the lower half of monitor one, Kolvin watches seven blue dots, representing his men, converge on the two red dots. Once they have them, it will take another twenty minutes for the squad to return to base, and forty-five minutes more to clear out of the woods. That’s too damned long. Monitor two comes to sudden life, and Kolvin sucks in a deep breath. The cameras swivel upward into the treetops, and high in the branches a shape moves slightly, its outline too vague to identify. It moves once more, just a hair, and the sun glints off something long and metallic.
—
Molly swung her leg wildly, missing the soldier’s head, but managed to pull free of the strong hand that gripped her ankle. She scrambled up the slope toward Joey, who was now some distance above her near the top of the hill. Dislodged by the boy’s boots, pieces of crumbled shale showered down upon her, making her own flight more difficult. But the falling rock gave her an idea, and as she climbed, she kicked chunks of shale into the face of her pursuer, who quickly fell behind, cursing as he dodged the hail of stone.
When she looked up again, her nephew had disappeared over the edge. Molly renewed her effort, kicking ferociously at the loose shale, but the soldier had pulled down his visor and no longer bothered to avoid the debris. He headed straight up the hill at her, and she switched tactics, concentrating once more on the climb. When the top of the incline was within a few centimeters, two pairs of strong arms emerged from nowhere to seize her and drag her roughly the remaining way up and over the edge of the embankment. Military boots, camouflage trousers—she had been outflanked. Joey was in the grip of two burly boys in uniform.
Joey screamed in rage and anguish. “Let us go. Why are doing this?”
“I can’t say,” said one of the boys, who appeared to be in charge. “Ms. Cheng just said to keep her grandson safe.”
Molly’s breathing stopped. Jolene Cheng. This hadn’t been a random attack at all. What did Cheng want with Joey? Why now, after all these years?
“We were perfectly safe until you came along,” said Molly.
“Might be, Ma’am, but Miz Cheng wants to see you.”
Molly didn’t respond. Jolene Cheng was an ambitious woman who had once been married to her father back on Earth. Molly had never met her father. He wasn’t even aware of her existence, yet his absence felt like a void in her very core. If only she could somehow go to Earth and bring him here, he would make things all right, he would cure Mama’s sickness and stop this horrible war which was coming as surely as the sun would rise in the morning. But going to Earth was not a possibility.
There were seven soldiers altogether, six men and one woman. The leader was called Private Cooper. None of them appeared older than Molly herself, who had just turned seventeen. Borns, she thought. They were Borns, like she and Joey, and that would explain why they moved so confidently through the forest.
After searching their backpacks, the soldiers snapped electronic anklets on them, and warned them not to wander more than 30 meters from Private Cooper, unless they were prepared to experience the most excruciating pain of their lives. They were escorted by two soldiers in the rear and one on either side, with Cooper in the lead. Escape was out of the question.
—
“Zoom in,” Kolvin says, feeling the panic return. The camera pulls the image closer—it looks to Kolvin like an Egyptian AP70. He’d seen a number of these anti-personnel launchers during his service in the Sinai Wars, too many to ever forget.
“Artillery,” he says under his breath, but it’s too late. He hears the shots and watches the camera follow two AP rounds hurtling toward him in slo-mo. Funny I see them so clearly, he thinks. They should be a blur at 500 kilometers per hour. Paralyzed now by fear, he watches the miniature grenades rip through the roof of his canopy and explode in a circus of color, dispatching scores of nano smart bombs into the air to snuff out all life within a fifty meter circumference. He doesn’t feel or see the minuscule projectiles entering his body to deliver their peaceful death.
—
The brisk downhill pace picked up and Cooper sent the woman and one of the men ahead down the canyon. His eyes reflected panic. Molly didn’t know what to make of it, but the soldiers were in a hurry, that much was certain. Molly and Joey walked in brisk silence, listening to the sound of tramping boots and snapping branches. The trees near the western transition zone were what Mama called pines, although Molly knew that pines were Earth trees, so they couldn’t actually be pines or firs or anything like that. The party pushed through the underbrush until it reached the trough of the canyon where a small creek ran to the west, and they turned to follow it downstream.
“I’m sorry, Joey,” Molly said, when she thought the soldiers were distracted. “I didn’t think they would come this far in.”
“They’re Borns, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
She had counted on the fact that most of the adults who had crossed over from Earth eighteen years ago, before they shut down the gates, had an unnatural fear of the deep Sweetland forest. It was an ominous sign if the New Americans were inducting Borns into the military. In a few years, when there were enough of them, they would be a great threat to The Communities, which had no army to defend itself—and until recently hadn’t needed one.
The radio on Cooper’s belt crackled, and a broken voice chirped for several seconds in an excited but unintelligible garble.
“Shit,” said Cooper. He halted the procession with a raised hand and motioned the other soldiers to gather around. “That was Roz. They found Sarge. He’s dead just like them others.”
“We told him he should let us handle this,” said another young man.
Molly listened with alarm. “What killed him?”
The soldiers merely stared at her. Then Cooper said, “Whatever it is they see and we don’t, Miss. Some call ‘em Indians, some say enemy soldiers, but whatever it was ran through a whole outpost two weeks ago, killed every last man up there.”
—
They carried the body of the man they called Sarge down the canyon on a stretcher constructed from his canvas tent and loaded it into a flying machine that looked like a dragonfly with a fat belly. She had seen helicopters in books, but the real thing seemed strangely unreliable. How could such a thing possibly fly?
The landscape was treeless and alien to Molly, who had never before been outside the shelter of the forest. The barren earth expanded as far as she could see into the western horizon, and it seemed to her, for the first time in a visceral way, that the universe was infinite, and she small and insignificant.
The big rotors began to turn, churning up dust, and one of the soldiers took Joey by the elbow and pulled him toward the helicopter. Molly tried to run after him, but Cooper clamped her wrist in his strong, unyielding hand. Halfway there, Joey twisted away from his escort and shouted, “Molly!” before being grabbed by a second soldier. The men, one on each side, dragged him the remainder of the way to the helicopter as he continued to call out her name. She struggled, furious and ineffective. Finally she called back to the boy, “I’ll come and get you Joey, I promise.”
Molly kicked at Cooper with a viciousness that surprised her, but he nimbly avoided her boot and laughed. “You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?”
Her anger quickly turned to something like grief as she realized her helplessness. “Where are they taking my nephew?” Her voice was a terrible howl of pain. “I need to go with him. I’m responsible for him.”
“You ain’t responsible any longer, Miss. We’re going to take care of him, now.”
“Why can’t I go with him?”
“I guess someone figured you’d be less trouble separated,” said Cooper, grinning. “Don’t worry, Miss, you’re both going to be taken good care of.”
“What are you going to do with me?” She fought to hold back the tears.
“We’re going to Port Harvest where someone’ll pick you up.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know, maybe Ms. Cheng, herself. Or someone who works for her.”
Just then the helicopter lifted off, taking Joey from her reach. Molly waited in misery, sprawled on the dusty ground, until a green military truck with New America Corporation, Special Security Forces painted on its door arrived and Private Cooper escorted her into the cab. The driver stayed behind with the unit as Cooper climbed in behind the wheel.
“Better buckle up, Miss. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
© 2010–2011, Duane Poncy
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