The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles) (8 page)

The predicament I find myself in now is one
I’m not sure I’m prepared to face. As the years have gone by, my life has become one never-ending routine. And now, when something finally challenges me, I’m afraid I lack the courage to stand up for what I know to be true and just. If this burden wasn’t enough, I now have to think of Lana. She is what I have grown to care about most. After only spending a short amount of time with her, she gives me a hope I have never felt in life.

Spurious rested his pen on the table and gazed out the window. The two crows were gone, their white droppings the only evidence they had ever existed. In the distance he could see the eerily opaque images of skyscrapers, shredded and torn by the fiery blasts of the nuke that hit miles away. He never understood why the State didn’t have them demolished; perhaps it was a reminder to the citizens of how lucky they were to have survived.

He
groaned and walked over to one of the AI portals. He certainly didn’t feel lucky.

“Anya, I want you to tap into the SGS mainframe and see if you can find any information about
the first years of the Biomass Revolution.”

The portal lit up and a blue hologram of Anya
appeared in front of Spurious.

“Spurious
, you know most of that information is classified; in fact, I doubt I’ll be able to find anything at all.”

“Just do your best,”
he replied, making his way over to his loft and plopping himself down on the soft bed.

“Sir, why are you interested in this information?”

Spurious rolled over and stared at her hologram. Her voice was feminine, but firm. He didn’t want to make her suspicious; she had the power to ruin his life if she thought he wasn’t patriotic. 

“It’s for one of the tunnel projects I’m working on, but don’t worry about it,” he lied.

A bead of sweat crawled down his forehead as he waited for her response.

“
Very well. Is there anything else I can do for you this evening?”

Spurious shook his head and closed his eyes.
He couldn’t escape the scrutiny of the State or the laws and the Knights that enforced them. They were all tools the government used to keep him obedient. But he was sick of being a sheep—sick of being compliant.

As the lights dimmed and darkness carpeted the small room, Spurious decided it was time for a change.

Chapter 2: Scorpions

“All warfare is based on deception.”

~Sun Tzu,
The Art Of War

Time
: 10:40 p.m. January 26, 2071

Location
: The Wastelands

Night was Obi’s favorite time in his day. It was, for the most part, the only time he had any peace, if you could call it that. During the day his unit moved about the outskirts of the great Tisaian walls, scavenging for weapons and food buried by the never ending dust and ash from the Biomass Wars. When he wasn’t training or looking for his next meal, he was telling jokes and stories with his friends in his unit—Squad 19.

The number assigned to
the small group of soldiers was nothing more than a few strands of string sewn carelessly into his uniform, but what they meant was a different story. The entire rebellion knew Squad 19 as a beacon of hope. They were the most respected unit in the entire Tisaian Democratic Union and even the CRK had grown to fear them.

It was an unusually clear night. The stars were bright and
plentiful in the small opening at the top of the old windmill.  Obi took great interest in examining them. When he was a child, his uncle brought him on a number of camping trips, pointing out different constellations and teaching him how to tell time by the position of the sun. A few years later he taught Obi the art of orientation, and he quickly became skilled with a compass and map—one of the main reasons he was the lead scout in Squad 19.

Obi
shivered. It was now late winter and with the days getting longer and warmer he opted to leave his thermal gear at headquarters to cut down his load. Tonight the decision haunted him, the cold wind biting through his fatigues. It was only the crackling fire that kept him and his squad from freezing.

Obi
sat dangerously close to the flames, warming his hands and wind burnt face. He checked his watch, realizing it was going on midnight. He should be asleep like the rest of his squad, who were already curled up in their sleeping bags.

A deep cough from one
of his soldiers startled him. His eyes quickly darted from his watch to Nathar, a 24 year old former refugee from the east coast. He had fallen sick days ago and the crackling in his lungs was getting worse each day. Obi knew the young man needed medicine soon, before his cold turned into something worse.

The Wastelands was not the place to fall ill. He had seen men die from lesser things than a cold. It had a way of catching you by surprise, when you least expected it. But Nathar was no ordinary man. He was a survivor, like the rest of the squad.

Obi recalled the day he helped rescue Nathar from the mines. Nathar, like so many others, had snuck into Tisaia through an abandoned storm drain, only to be captured and placed in an immigrant camp. The conditions there nearly killed him, and if it wasn’t for Obi and several other rebels, Nathar would surely have perished in the mines. It was at that point Obi offered him a chance to fight for immigrant rights and freedom, something Nathar couldn’t turn down.

It was a dismal story and a common one.
For a moment it reminded him of Sasa, another young immigrant he had rescued. The memory was too terrible—too painful to remember. She was still a teenager when Squad 15 brought her to him, but unlike any teenager Obi had ever met. She was mentally broken in the beginning, but she had a wild spirit and wanted so desperately to fight.  Reluctantly he agreed to train her to shoot, in exchange for her loyalty. In the end she had died with her fingers gripped tightly around the .45 he had given her. She had sacrificed her life to save several members of Squad 19, taking two Tin Cans out in the process.

Obi felt nauseated.
If only I had been there—if only I had
…his thoughts trailed off. He couldn’t go back there, not tonight. He had to keep his wits. His squad was in the Wastelands and falling prey to his demons would do nothing but get more innocent people killed.

His fingers found the
cold silver of the necklace around his neck, the one she had given him the day of her death. It was the only thing that gave him solace—the only thing left of her.

He sucked in a lungful of air and
continued to scan the room, his eyes falling on Alexir Jahn next. He was known to his friends and fellow squad mates as Ajax. The 30 year old soldier was given his second name by his companions after he single handedly killed two Tin Cans with nothing but a knife. Named after the Greek warrior from Homer’s Iliad, Ajax had perhaps the most fitting nickname of anyone in his squad.

There was also
Creo Saafi, lying in the middle of the pack. A Spaniard military refugee, he was considered the wisest of Squad 19. And while he did not have physical command of the group, he was often consulted by senior leadership about military strategy.

Squad 19 was made up of the best the TDU had to offer. If the rebellion had special forces, they were it.

Obi knew better than anyone that The Biomass Revolution would be won with flesh and bones, something the TDU lacked. The entire army consisted of around one hundred soldiers, a mere fraction of the CRK forces. And while they could always replenish their ranks from immigrants and Rohanians looking for work, they weren’t trained soldiers like the Knights. Most of the new recruits didn’t make it past their first year.

Obi
groaned, trying not to let the numbers affect his judgment. He knew his life expectancy was cut in half the day he joined the rebellion, but he did so because he believed in the cause. Nothing would change that, not even if the TDU were outnumbered one hundred to one. 

He looked back
down at his watch.
Time to check the perimeter,
he thought, rising and walking to the entrance of the ancient stone windmill. He swiped his sniper rifle off the ground and glassed the darkness. The infrared scope allowed him to see any heat signatures approaching their camp, but tonight the small circular screen didn’t pick up anything but several small rodents scavenging the barren dirt ground.

He placed the rifle back down,
resting it against the thick stone. Next he checked the roof to ensure no smoke was escaping from the top of the windmill for anyone to see. Satisfied, he walked back to the entrance to examine the broken door hanging loosely off its hinges.

“Go to bed,” Ajax grumbled.

His rough voice was almost soothing to Obi, comforting in the perilous world filled with danger at every turn. He watched Ajax turn over in his sleeping bag, his monstrous arms poking out from under the nylon blankets, revealing his chest plate of armor. The lightly bearded man rarely took the metal off; it was as much as part of him as the radiation scars on his arms.

Ajax scratched his receding blonde hair.
“Creo already checked the place out, it’s safe, boss.”

“
We’re never truly safe,” Obi shot back.

As lead scout it was his job to keep the squad out of harm’s way. “I just wanted
to make sure there isn’t any smoke escaping from the roof.”

The noise awoke Nathar as
he stirred in his sleep. “Guys, go to bed. Goddamn, you’re being loud,” he moaned.

Obi walked back to his sleeping pad and took
his .45 out of its holster, placing it under his small pillow. It was the same gun he had let Sasa borrow the night before she died.

H
e stretched out his fatigued body carefully on the rocky ground, caressing the silver of the necklace before folding his hands behind his head. He was so tired from traveling that he was dizzy, but he still couldn’t sleep. He was too worried about the next few weeks of the campaign. More innocent people were going to die.

It was necessary to achieve their ultimate goals, but it was nonetheless disheartening to think of innocents being caught in the crossfire in a war that had already claimed so many lives—lives like Sasa’s. His superiors made it quite clear he should take necessary steps to ensure innocent people were not killed in the next attack. But Obi knew from past experience that when bullets started flying he had little control over their final destination.

Obi opened his eyes again and
glanced over at his men who were now all fast asleep. For some reason he scanned the youthful face of Nathar again. His thick brown hair was cropped short, and his eyes were crystal blue and kind—the type you couldn’t help but trust. The combination of youthful features gave him the appearance of a teenager at first glance, which by TDU standards equated to a grown man, battle ready. It was the unfortunate fate of so many young people trapped in a never ending war. Nathar should have been in college or starting a career, but instead he was forced to fight.

I
bet he misses his family.

All Obi knew was
that Nathar’s family had been killed in the first part of the Biomass Wars in the last offensive of the United States Army, just months before most of the country collapsed into ashes. Nathar sought refuge at a camp in New York City, before it was leveled by a tactical nuclear weapon.

Obi knew
loss wasn’t specific to Nathar. His entire squad had lost their families. They were all orphans now. Sasa had been too, like so many others, their innocence robbed from them at an early age. In an odd way Obi thought of them as his children, wanting more than anything to protect them and keep them safe. If it came down to it he would take a bullet for any one of them, but he couldn’t save them all—he couldn’t even save Sasa.

In his mind the only difference between his men and his biological son h
e chose to hide with a Rohanian family years ago was blood.

The thought of his estranged son filled his eyes with tears. It
was a painful memory, recalling the look in his son’s eyes when he was forced to say goodbye. It was a decision he lived with every day, but he sought comfort in the reality of the situation—giving up his son had saved him from the world of constant war. And growing up without a father wasn’t as bad as not growing up at all.

Obi closed his tired eyes
and massaged his temples in an attempt to relieve the pain of the past and his worries of the future. He thought once more of his duty to Tisaia and Squad 19 before he drifted off to sleep.

Time
: 7:01 a.m. January 28, 2071

Location
: The Wastelands

Obi’s radio blared to life, the static crackling over the fierce wind.

“Obi,
this is Jackson, standby for report. Over.”

“Roger, Obi here.
Standby to copy. Over.”

      
“Reports of a convoy of Scorpions heading your way. Over.”

       “Copy that. Standby.”

Obi crawled out onto the edge of the massive bluff overlooking an abandoned highway below. He covered his mouth with his bandana and glassed the valley, watching a trail of dust follow a few black specks in the distance. They were still about two clicks from the western wall surrounding the border of Tisaia.

He discarded his binoculars and pushed a button on his goggles, zooming in to get a better look.
Sure enough a convoy of CRK Scorpions was racing towards their location.

The dune buggies were covered in gmetal, equipped with .50 cal machine guns, shocks for off-roading and massive Biomass fed engines.
Their most infamous trait, however, wasn’t their deadly equipment, it was the humming their engines made. Any reasonable TDU soldier knew when you heard that humming, you didn’t stand your ground; you ran, or hid.

Scorpions were one of the most effective weapons the CRK had in its arsenal against the TDU
, who primarily traveled by horseback, by foot, or in a vehicle if they were fortunate enough to steal one. 

“Jackson, this is Obi. We
have four CRK Scorpions heading our way, waiting for your orders. Over.”

“Roger
, Obi, sit tight, we’re on our way with armor piercing rounds. Prepare to defend your location; we’re still about three hours away, over.”

Three
hours? We aren’t going to last 30 minutes against that type of firepower
.

“Hurry the hell up
, Jackson,” Obi said, grabbing his rifle. He rose to his feet and stumbled over the broken ground.

“Nathar, you and
Creo take up positions on the highest part of that rock formation you can find. Creo, you take my sniper rifle; I’m going to use our missile launcher,” he said, pointing into the distance.

“Yes
sir,” they said simultaneously as they raced off towards a narrow path leading up to the rock formation. Obi watched them leave, his eyes following them as they turned their backs and began to climb up the steep trail.

The gray of morning consumed the landscape as a weak sun struggled to rise, the
rays of crimson splitting the horizon in two. He turned, looking at Ajax, who still sat at the edge of the rock, peering out through his binoculars at the approaching vehicles.

“It’s just you and me
, Ajax. How many grenades are you carrying?”