Rebellion's Fury Read online

  Which means we’re at a standstill, Wells thought. They can’t help us until they know we can win, and we can’t win unless they help us.

  Stanton was silent, too, and for the first time since the meeting began looked dejected. She clearly didn’t have an answer. They were close to getting Federal America’s two superpower rivals to interfere in the rebellion, but there was no way to close the deal. Wells had doubts about whether the requisite success on the ground was possible, but he also had a lot of faith in Damian Ward . . . so there was some hope. But what there wasn’t was a way to get the word out, to even know what was going on. And without that, it didn’t matter what victories Damian achieved.

  “Will you at least discuss the plan of action with your people?” Asha asked suddenly. “With the idea that any approval would be subject to sufficient evidence of rebel success on the ground?”

  Xi paused for a moment. Then he looked back at Stanton. “You are very persuasive, Asha. I will discuss the matter. Perhaps we can even begin some tentative planning in the unlikely event we do intervene.” He stared at her intently. “But I can promise you there will be no action—and nothing but outright denial of any involvement by my government—unless we are satisfied the rebels have a real chance at victory.”

  “Very well . . .”

  Wells had been listening to his two companions, but now his head snapped around, almost instinctively. He’d heard something, he was sure of it. But he couldn’t see anything.

  He turned back toward Stanton, pausing halfway. There it was again! He spun, and even as he did he saw the movement, heard the footsteps on the cracked concrete.

  “Run,” he said, louder than he’d intended. Stanton and Xi looked up, silent and stunned for a second. Then both took off, racing into the block of shattered buildings, even as the blasts of focused light began to hit the walls and buildings all around.

  Wells ran, trying to hold back the terror and move as quickly as he could. He raced forward, watching as his two companions ducked behind a section of three-story-high brick wall. He lunged forward, driving toward the same spot. He was three meters away, then two. One last leap to cover.

  Then his body froze, wracked by agony, his muscles spasming under the high-voltage charge. It was a stunner, he guessed, in an ethereal, vague way. He’d never been shot by a stun gun, of course, but it seemed like it would feel this way.

  He knew he had to get around the corner, to escape with Asha and Xi, but it was impossible. He felt helpless, his bodily functions slipping from his control. There wasn’t pain, at least nothing serious after the initial shock, but he was nauseated, his head woozy. Then he dropped to his knees, teetering with tenuous and fading balance before he fell forward, hard onto the ground, and lost consciousness.

  Chapter 26

  Northern Edge of the Green Hill Forest

  118 Kilometers Northwest of Landfall

  Federal Colony Alpha-2, Epsilon Eridani II (Haven)

  Damian walked through the woods, along the makeshift trail his people had made. It wasn’t created by deliberate design, but simply by walking along the most level section of ground for months now. He knew Ben Withers would be apoplectic when he saw that Damian was missing. The aide hated it when his commander went out alone, without so much as a single guard with him. For that matter, so would John Danforth, Luci Morgan . . . even Violetta Wells. They’d all gathered around him like a pack of dogs protecting him. He appreciated the thought behind it all, but that didn’t stop it from driving him crazy.

  But none of that mattered, not now. He just had to get away, to steal a few moments for himself. If he didn’t he’d go insane . . . and then he’d be no use to anyone.

  His army had been camped here through the winter, a brutal and bitter one, worse than any other, at least as long as he’d been on Haven, and, according to some of the native-born troopers in the army, the worst in forty years.

  Cold weather wasn’t something residents of technologically advanced civilizations usually worried too much about, but his people were refugees of such a society now, driven far from their homes, from anything but the untouched, and for three straight months, snow- and ice-covered forest.

  Damian had continued his army’s retreat after the disastrous Second Battle of Dover, driving his exhausted survivors all the way to the northern reaches of Green Hill Forest. That put them almost a hundred and twenty kilometers from the capital, with the wild rapids of the Far Point River and vast stretches of dense forest between his battered force and Landfall.

  Still, he hadn’t been able to explain why the enemy hadn’t pursued his fragile army. Damian had expected the federals to move north, right on his tail, to finish the rebellion with a final crushing victory. He’d have had no hope of defeating such an assault. None.

  But the weeks turned into months, and still no offensive came. He and Luci Morgan and the other veterans used the unexpected time to train their force of Havenites, driving them hard, as often as not through knee-deep snow and subfreezing temperatures. The exhausted troops built shelters and defenses for themselves, using the trees as raw material, and as often as not crude hand tools as construction implements. The rebels were short on everything, and much of the army’s scant supply of generators and power plants had been reserved for Jonas Holcomb’s secret project. So like an army from centuries before, the troops burned logs to stay warm, or at least something as close to warm as they could get. And every day they rose at dawn, achingly, miserably, to another day of drilling that had to seem merciless to them.

  Damian had watched his army waste away even as he trained them, and every day’s roll call told of a new pack of deserters, men and women fleeing the terrible weather, the brutal training, the feeling of a lost cause. Damian chafed at seeing his force withering away, and he gave speeches, marched in the snowy clearings with his troops, shared their meager rations. But he didn’t punish the deserters, not even when his people caught them. He understood, and didn’t blame the soldiers for slipping away. He struggled any way he could to keep them in camp, posting guards at night and patrols along the roads leading off, as much to discourage potential deserters as to actually apprehend those who left anyway. Still, for all he could manage, every idea he had come up with to hold his force together, he’d been unable to halt the flow . . . and unwilling to resort to extreme sanctions, the kind of terror that Cal Jacen and many of his Society allies demanded. The apoplectic rage on Jacen’s face was his only solace in the whole bad business. Pissing off the Society leader was something he considered a pleasure, and he told Jacen again and again he would not allow deserters to be executed. Sometimes that came in professional language, the kind of semiformal response one expected from a general—but others, it was blunter, rougher.

  There was a bright side, besides annoying Jacen, at least of a sort. The soldiers who remained, the ones who endured everything Damian and his veteran officers—and the weather—could throw at them, they’d become something very much like real veterans and, Damian dared to imagine, even a match for the federals. For all that his year of preparation had been intended to achieve the same thing, in practice, the proximity of the enemy and the urgency of the situation had been the missing elements then. Now his soldiers did what they had to do. They were committed to a fight to the end, and their desperation awoke an inner strength Damian doubted most of them had realized they had.

  He owed the achievements that had been made to the troops themselves, the men and women who’d endured relentless agony for months. He owed it to his officers, as well, and to John Danforth, who had somehow kept the Haven government together, despite the fact that every major population center on the planet was controlled by the federals. But he knew on some level that most of all he owed it to Patrick Killian, and however few of his tattered rangers and soldiers were still alive.

  Killian had taken it on himself to inflict terror in the hearts of the federal troops near Landfall, and against all odds, he’d done something very much like
that. Damian’s information was spotty, of course, and always well behind, brought to his camp by stragglers and the occasional hardy scout who slipped south to secure intel for the army, but it was clear. Killian’s campaign had started in the autumn, just after the massive string of sabotage attacks in Landfall that preceded the rangers’ evacuation from the city. Killian had pulled his people out under the cover of night and confusion. But he hadn’t stopped there.

  The first attacks after the retreat had been against the enemy supply line on the Old North Road . . . as well as a particularly savage and gruesome assault on John Danforth’s house, which had been occupied by federal forces. The rangers had shown no mercy there, and when the feds retook the place, they discovered a true nightmare. Their garrison had been killed to the last man, and not in pretty ways.

  Damian often didn’t approve of Killian’s methods, as he didn’t here, but he couldn’t argue with the results. The federals went crazy, pouring increasing amounts of their strength into trying to root his raiders out of the woods near Landfall, and to hunt down and destroy the force that had so savagely killed their people. That struggle, which had raged all winter, had been beyond brutal. No quarter was asked for, and none was given. The two forces faced each other in the frigid woods and through raging blizzards, and the rangers held their ground against assault after assault from their more heavily armed enemies.

  But eventually, numbers and resources told, and Killian’s force dwindled, soldiers dying in combat, on the retreat, the wounded freezing to death in their scant tents. Finally the survivors were driven ever farther north, surrounded and hunted down one man at a time. Damian didn’t know how many Killian had left, or even if the ranger commander himself was still alive. But he knew he owed him a debt, one he could never repay.

  Killian’s raids against the supply lines had done more than inconvenience the federals. They had saved the rebel army. The federal forces who had won the battle at Dover were forced to pull back. Almost cut off from Landfall by the rangers, they had to move back along their lines of communication, clearing them and reopening the flow of supplies. By the time they had finished that, the rebel army had retired farther to the north and dug in. And the federals had a new focus, the extermination of the guerilla forces hiding in Blackwood Forest, and in every farmstead and barn the cooperative citizens could provide.

  “Damian!”

  He turned abruptly, startled by the loud yell, but only for an instant. He would recognize Ben Withers’s voice anywhere.

  “I’m sorry, Ben.” He’d been wagering in his head who would track him down first. John Danforth and Luci Morgan had been likely prospects, but his old aide had been the favorite by a large margin. “I know I shouldn’t leave the perimeter, but . . .”

  “No, General, it’s not that.” Damian realized Withers was excited about something. “It’s Dr. Holcomb, sir. He’s been looking all over for you. He has a prototype ready to show you. A suit, General . . . he has a suit ready to show you.”

  Damian felt a rush of surprise. Jonas Holcomb was a genius, not in the way the word was bastardized and thrown around, but in the true, literal sense. Damian had respected Holcomb enough to divert supplies to his project, things that his suffering army desperately needed elsewhere, but even so, he’d never quite believed that the scientist could build something as sophisticated as he’d proposed, not in a row of hastily built wooden shacks hidden in the woods.

  Damian lurched toward Withers and said, “Let’s go, Ben.” He felt a rush of excitement. He was proud of his soldiers, of what the stalwarts had become. But he knew there weren’t enough of them to defeat the federals, not without some kind of edge.

  Maybe we’ve finally got that edge.

  It was against his nature to allow optimism to excite him, but now he did it anyway. He considered hope a poor tool of the tactician, but he already believed himself a poor tactician, so he might as well own it.

  For some reason, that thought made him feel better than he had in weeks.

  “General Ward is a good man, Mr. Jacen. He took me on to his staff when I . . .” Violetta Wells had jumped at the chance to get off the battle line when Jacen had offered it, but she bore the guilt of leaving her comrades for the relative safety of headquarters. She was glad to be where she was, to be away from the relentless exhaustion and fear, and she knew if she’d stayed where she had been, she would have died. But the shame was still there, some days weighing heavily on her.

  “Yes, Violetta. And how many times have I asked you to call me Cal?” he said with an oily smile. “Damian Ward is a good man, in many ways. But these are not normal circumstances. When General Ward allows soldiers to flee, for example, to renege on their commitments, to the revolution, and to their comrades, he weakens us all.” A pause. “He makes it far likelier the rebellion will fail. Far likelier all of us will end up on the scaffold. This is the kind of area where he needs our aid, Violetta. Too much of the pressure is on him constantly. We must help carry some of the weight.”

  She was always uncomfortable when Jacen started talking this way about the general. What he said made sense, but it also felt . . . not quite right. Helping the general bear his burdens was one thing, but she felt a vague queasiness listening to Jacen. It wasn’t his words so much, more a . . . feeling. Damian Ward had been good to her, yes, but Jacen had been as well, and, as much as the doubts nagged at her, she had to admit she did agree with him, at least on some level. She’d sacrificed everything to remain on Haven, to join the rebellion, and the idea of men and women who had sworn to fight for it sneaking away in the middle of the night, it revolted her. And then thoughts of her own special treatment flowed back into her mind, and her revulsion of others turned to disgust with herself.

  “I understand. But the general does what he does out of kindness, out of love for his soldiers, all his soldiers.” She stopped for a few seconds, and when she continued, her voice was shaky. “I don’t know that I wouldn’t have run myself, Cal, if you hadn’t helped me get a posting here. I was at my wit’s end then, and the winter hadn’t even started. How much can I hate people for doing what I can’t be sure I myself wouldn’t have done?”

  “Violetta, it isn’t about judging people.” Though his voice suggested he had indeed judged the deserters. “There is no room for half measures, no place for weakness. Not now. We have declared independence. We have thrown a challenge directly at Federal America’s government, and they do not take such things lightly. Do you have any idea what the federal army does to troopers who desert? We cannot hold our soldiers to lesser standards, not if we are to win this fight.”

  Jacen stared at her for a moment. Then he said, “I am not asking you to do anything to hurt the general. I just want you to continue to provide me with information on what he does, what he says when he is in conference with his officers. With John Danforth. I’m trying to help the general, Violetta, not to harm him. But I want to do what I must for the rebellion, too. Will you help me?”

  She hesitated, still feeling uncomfortable with what she had been doing. She hadn’t been privy to any real secrets, and sometimes she even wondered why Jacen cared about the reports she gave him. But he was right. It was going to take more than ideals and compassion if Haven was to win its freedom. More, she’d seen how stretched thin General Ward had been. She admired him—his courage and commitment—but as an organizer, it wasn’t hard to see he wasn’t necessarily at his best. Cal Jacen, though, had helped organize the whole rebellion, and had juggled the many members of the Society for years. So if he was able to help, why wouldn’t she in turn help him? She’d joined the Society because she’d believed that drastic measures were called for, and she still felt that way. More so, in ways, now that her childish naivety had been stripped away.

  “Yes, Cal.” She felt the guilt even as the words came out, but as she walked away back toward the camp, she told herself she was doing it for the rebellion, even to help General Ward himself.

  The thoughts made h
er feel better, for a moment, but the doubts were quick to creep back out of the shadows.

  Chapter 27

  Federal Headquarters

  Landfall City

  Federal Colony Alpha-2, Epsilon Eridani II (Haven)

  “My tolerance is at an end, Colonel Granz. For three months, no, nearly four, I have waited and watched as your celebrated veterans have been dragged all through the area around Landfall chasing a band of brigands you do not seem to be able to eradicate. All the while, we have been unable to mount a final attack on the rebels, and even routine supply shipments need massive escorts to get through. Can you explain this to me, Colonel?”

  Granz stood at attention, his discipline slammed in place, restraining his more human thoughts about a hundred ways Semmes could get killed near the fighting. If he ever came near the fighting . . .

  “General, the pacification operation is moving along satisfactorily. The enemy guerillas have been seriously degraded. While I cannot provide a meaningful estimate on their percentage casualties, they are clearly more than 50 percent, and perhaps as high as 80. Escort requirements have dropped considerably, and it is clear the enemy no longer has the capacity to mount major operations. Within a month, two at most, the entire area within fifty kilometers of the capital will be fully secure.”

  “Another month? Two? That is unacceptable, Colonel. Why are your people so incapable of finishing this?”

  Granz bit back his anger again. “Sir, you have to understand. The people, many of them are on the side of the rebels. We have enemy soldiers moving in groups of three and four, taking shelter in farmhouses, and getting intelligence from the locals. Every time we send out a strong column, the word spreads before we can reach the objective. This is not the kind of operation my men are trained to implement, sir.”