Noble Conflict (12 page)

‘Well done, mate,’ Kaspar whispered ruefully. ‘Three out of three.’

He was replaying yet another one of Dillon’s hilarious diatribes in his head when he suddenly became aware of a vibration in the ground. Here we go, he thought. Search and Rescue responding to my beacon.

But then he realized that the frequency was too low and the vibrations too powerful. The ground rumbled deep beneath his body. It couldn’t be a vehicle. This was more seismic. Hell! Most of the earthquake activity in the Badlands was centred along the DeVries Fault – about twenty-five clicks east – but quite bad shocks could happen anywhere; occasionally they were even felt in Capital City in spite of the geo-stabilizers deep beneath the ground all around the city walls and beneath the ground of the city itself. Kaspar waited for the shaking to die down, but it didn’t. It got worse. The amplitude built and now he could actually see ground waves, the floor of the gully undulating like choppy water.

‘Is there anything else that can go wrong today?’ he wondered as he tried to force his legs to move.

Rhea had placed him under a rock outcrop for shade, but now he was being peppered with falling stones. He needed to shift before twenty tonnes of rock shook itself loose and turned into an avalanche. Kaspar’s arms were working pretty well now, but his legs had all the strength of wet noodles. He crawled about fifteen metres using just his arms, but he was still in the gully. The vibrations were still building, and rocks the size of his head and
larger were now crashing down all around him. Kaspar kept crawling but his luck couldn’t hold for ever.

It didn’t. A rock struck him a glancing blow on the right temple. Everything seemed to go quiet, and for the second time in less than an hour he had tunnel vision. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the rock that had hit him. It looked exactly like a melon. Dillon would have loved that.

Kaspar’s first impression of the afterlife was that it was confusing and uncomfortable. He was flying backwards, above a desert, and there wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t hurt. He was swooping over sand and mountains, and he could hear the sounds of falling rocks over the roaring of the blood in his ears. From the distance came the voice of an old woman calling him to dinner. Kaspar didn’t recognize the voice but he did know that she was calling to him. The pounding in his head was terrible and surely all his ribs were broken? His legs probably were too, but somehow he flew on.

‘Grandma,’ he heard himself shout. ‘I’m coming.’

He hadn’t realized it before, but he was famished. He could see the woman in the distance and he waved to her as he raced down the grassy slope towards the little cottage by the bridge. The air was so warm, the sunlight so bright and in the cottage there would be fresh-baked bread and—

Another jolt of agony from his tortured ribs interrupted him and he opened his eyes. The grassy slope, the cottage, the bridge, they had all vanished. Now he saw
sand and rocks again. Perplexed, he remembered that all four of his grandparents had died before he was born, and as for the cottage  . . . He closed his eyes again, trying to place it.

There it was again. The smell of freshly baked bread. He could actually taste it, and it was so good. It brought back memories of his face buried in Grandma’s apron, and she smelled of baking and dried mellisse berries and  . . .

Kaspar’s mind started to clear. Pain forced its way past his memories and his senses sharpened. The mountains were only rocks and pebbles; he wasn’t as high as he thought, only a metre or so above the ground – and he wasn’t flying; he was being carried. He was wedged in the beak of a black-backed hawk as it returned to its nest high in the mountains where  . . .

No, that wasn’t right either.

He could see running feet below him, but not his  . . .

He was slung across someone’s shoulders and they were running – fast – across the hot sand. Kaspar could smell sulphur and fresh bread, he could see pounding feet and pain ripped through his body and Grandma  . . . he could hear his grandma singing to him. The memories of things never said, never done crowded in on him, simultaneously comforted and disturbed him as the pounding feet carried him off the sand and onto solid rock. Up and up, until the sounds of avalanche faded, and the feet stopped moving.

Kaspar was laid gently on a granite shelf – the most comfortable, warmest granite shelf – and his grandma pulled the blankets up to his chin and sang him to sleep.

When Kaspar woke up, he was surprised to find he wasn’t in the soft feather bed in the cottage by the bridge. He was lying on an outcrop of volcanic rock in the Badlands. From his position about twenty metres above the desert floor, he could see the gully, and there in the distance, the burned wreck of the hovercar where they had crashed and Dillon had—

Kaspar looked around. He was alone. His uniform was shredded and burned, he hurt like hell and he had a field dressing around his head, but he didn’t appear to be missing any vital parts. The medical kit, a half-full water bottle and his Search and Rescue beacon lay beside him. Where was the rescue team? Standard protocol for an emergency SaR beacon activation would have been for a Rapid Response unit to secure the area before the medics moved in to attend the wounded and pick up the bodies, but he was alone.

So who had bandaged his head? An unexpected movement caught his attention. About a kilometre away, running fast and skirting the rocks, was a slight, black-clad figure. She looked back briefly before disappearing, just as
Kaspar heard the distinctive sound of help arriving. Two gunships cleared the ridge behind him. One stayed high as top-cover while the other swept low to check out the area around where he was lying.

‘Here! I’m up here,’ Kaspar shouted pointlessly. His voice was no more than a hoarse croak, and besides, nobody could have heard him over the racket of the gunships. The low scout swung by, and Kaspar saw a Guardian point to him through the open side door, then turn to say something to her colleagues. And even though he knew they’d seen him now, Kaspar still kept trying to shout, ‘I’m here. I’m here!’

Ten long, short minutes later, Kas was on his way home.

The speeding gunship was even noisier on the inside, so no one spoke much on the way back, except for the occasional word of sympathy or reassurance. Kaspar had plenty of time to think while his superficial wounds were patched and his broken ribs strapped up. He was missing Dillon already.

And he was confused.

Why had he had such a vivid dream about some elderly woman with silver-grey hair and twinkling green eyes whom he’d never met? And why call her ‘Grandma’? But most puzzling of all, why would a ruthless, fanatical terrorist pass up not one, but two chances to kill him, and instead carry him nearly one kilometre to safety?

Much was lost in the War to End All Wars. Perhaps the saddest loss of all was the destruction of our past. So much historical data was destroyed. The books, libraries and computer data we had for so long taken for granted were also casualties of the War. Our enemy realized that our dependence on our computer networks could be used to their advantage. Their tactics included the design and implementation of computer viruses to seek and wipe out any reference to the Alliance. Thus they sought to erase us, not just from the future by depriving us of our present, but from history itself.

The High Councillors were therefore given the task of reconstructing the historical texts from what little data remained, not just of the Alliance’s past but also of all the many and varied nations that used to exist on our planet. Even after a significant number of decades the task is not yet complete. Our responsibility may be daunting, but we cannot use that as an excuse for complacency.

The time for grieving about our past is over. It is incumbent upon all of us to learn and grow from the reproduced historical texts. Only by learning from the past can we move forward with confidence into our future.

And we cannot, we must not, allow the Crusaders to hold us back from that goal.

Extract taken from ‘The Origins of the Insurgency’ by Brother Telem

A fortnight later, Kaspar was still in the Clinic – and climbing the walls. He was undergoing his sixth operational fitness assessment and it wasn’t going any better than the first five.

‘Come on, Doc,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m fine. My ribs are healing, the pain is very nearly gone and I should be getting back to work. Just sign the release and I’ll be out of your way.’

‘Not so fast, Guardian Wilding,’ Dr Hondo replied. ‘There’s more to it than the broken bones. We’ve only just got the infected burns under control and your brain chemistry is still not back to the baseline set at your last pre-accident physical.’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ said Kaspar quietly.

Everyone in the Clinic referred to what had happened in the Badlands as ‘the accident’, as if someone had slipped on a bar of soap. Nobody seemed to want to discuss the fact that a Guardian had died in a terrorist attack. Of course there had been a debrief. Some pencil-necked clerk from MII, the Ministry of Information and Intelligence – or, as those at the Academy called it, the Ministry of
Insensitive Ignorance – had come round and spoken to him about ‘the accident’.

‘You have nothing to worry about, Guardian Wilding. The paperwork has all been taken care of,’ smiled the unctuous clerk. Kaspar had taken in his dark blue suit and his pristine collarless white shirt and taken an instant dislike to him, something he very rarely did.

‘So if you’d just like to sign here.’ The clerk waved a data-tablet and an electronic stylus under Kaspar’s nostrils. He was moving the tablet so quickly Kaspar could only make out the odd word or two.

Kaspar took hold of the stylus and tablet, much to the clerk’s annoyance, and settled down to read what he was signing.

‘There’s no need to read it,’ the clerk announced quickly. ‘It’s all perfectly in order.’

‘Nevertheless, I never sign anything without reading it first, otherwise I might end up agreeing to give you my liver and both of my kidneys while I still have need of them,’ said Kaspar.

The clerk wasn’t happy. And by the time Kaspar had read the short document on the tablet screen, neither was he. He reread the offending paragraph out loud just in case he’d read it wrong the first time round.

‘
A near-miss with a rocket-propelled grenade induced a lateral stabilizer failure on the hovercar, resulting in an uncontrolled grounding and unfortunate injuries and a fatality. This accident may be put down to Insurgent activity and an inappropriate pilot response resulting in inadvertent pilot error
.’

He hadn’t read it wrong at all. In fact, it was actually worse on a second reading.

‘You must be seriously bat-crap crazy if you think I’m signing this.’ Kaspar threw the tablet down on his bed in disgust.

‘Guardian Wilding, this text has been authorized by Brother Simon himself,’ said the clerk.

‘I don’t give a damn. First of all, there was no near-miss with an RPG – it was a direct hit. And second, third and fourth, there was no pilot error. It wasn’t Dillon’s fault, and I’ll see you and the whole High Council in hell before I sign anything that says otherwise.’

‘We
have
stated that it was
inadvertent
pilot error  . . .’

‘ “Inadvertent” isn’t the word I’m having a problem with,’ Kaspar replied coldly. ‘What’s wrong with telling it like it was? A murdering, scumbag Insurgent shot us down and killed my partner.’

‘The High Council need to be careful how many  . . . deaths are attributed to the Insurgents, and we have already reached this month’s quota,’ said the clerk.

Kaspar stared. Seriously? The truth was being bent to the point of breaking to make some statistics work?

‘I’m not signing that,’ he repeated quietly.

‘Guardian Wilding, let me remind you that you and your partner deviated from the prescribed route to get to your destination. If you’d followed the established travel protocols all of this might have been avoided.’

Kaspar sat on his hands to stop himself from punching the clerk’s face clear through his head. Did this guy think
Kaspar didn’t already know that, hadn’t agonized over that day in, day out since he’d been rescued?

‘As I explained in my debrief,’ he said coldly, ‘we saw a flash of light east of our position and went to investigate.’

‘You should’ve called it in and waited for backup.’

‘Going in to investigate without calling it in first was my decision, not Dillon’s. The blame should be laid at my door. The hovercar’s data recorder would’ve told you that.’

‘Guardian Wilding, you survived. Dillon didn’t. You’re already in the public eye as a hero. How would it look if we were to suddenly say that you aren’t?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Well, that kind of attitude is a luxury the High Council can’t afford,’ said the clerk.

Kaspar shrugged. Not his problem.

The clerk gave Kaspar a calculating look.

‘I’m not signing that,’ Kaspar stated once more. ‘If you think I’m bluffing, try me.’

‘Very well. I am authorized to omit the last sentence as that’s obviously the one you find so objectionable,’ said the clerk.

Kaspar watched as the clerk input a passcode onto the tablet and swiped his finger over the offending sentence to delete it. He handed the tablet back to Kaspar.

‘Brother Simon has instructed me not to leave this room without your signature on this document,’ said the clerk.

Kaspar read it carefully again to ensure that the line blaming Dillon for what had happened had indeed been
deleted. But what was to stop the MII from putting back the sentence once they had his signature? He signed on the indicated line at the bottom of the document, then he signed his name right across the body of the text as well. He handed back the tablet and stylus. It wasn’t fool-proof by any means, but it was the best he could come up with in the circumstances.

The clerk frowned down at the tablet in his hand. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘If you add or delete anything else to that report, my signature won’t match up. I just want to make sure that what I sign is what gets delivered back to Brother Simon and the archives,’ said Kaspar.