EDEN (The Union Series) (22 page)

I stopped briefly to
study the bodies. They were civilians - two men in their late fifties and an
old lady, dressed in ordinary clothing. There wasn’t a drop of blood on them,
though. As I stooped over them I noticed that none of them were wearing their
respirators, instead the rubber masks lay on the ground beside them. Their
mouths hung open, and their eyes stared blankly toward the sky.

They hadn’t been
shot, I realised. They had survived the attack on the train, but their
attackers had captured them as they tried to make their escape. I imagined the
three civilians gasping for air as their respirators were held tauntingly in
front of them. Maybe they fought for a bit, struggling to get their masks back,
but their killers would have just laughed as they lost their strength and
quickly succumbed to the toxic air. Why waste a dart when Eden could do the
work for them?

I didn’t stop to chat
with the section about what we had seen, instead I headed off again, leading
them away from the train in search of a suitable location to break away into
the forest.

As I marched, I
thought about the train, and the dead civilians beside it. The war in the
Bosque seemed to have sunk to another new low. Had the Loyalists resorted to
destroying everything as they withdrew, so that it couldn’t fall back into
Edo’s hands? I didn’t know the answer, but I wondered if I would find the
answer in Aasha village.

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The Village

The weather turned on
us just after the sun set, the wind picking up as black, swollen clouds
unleashed a torrent of rain down onto the valley below. We managed to approach
the village without detecting even a single hint of activity, creeping right up
to the edge of the forest. I crouched amongst the ferns as I surveyed the
village, searching for any sign of danger.

There was a small
patch of farmland separating the village dome from the trees, looking as though
it had been tended to recently; its crops were almost ready to harvest. The
atmospheric dome had been made of some form of clear plastic, but it had
collapsed, draping over the buildings like a badly assembled tent. It sagged in
places as it collected rainwater, the plastic misting so that only the faint,
darkened outlines of the buildings were visible. I could see where a maglev
rail entered the dome through a large plastic airlock door - the same maglev
line that had carried those civilians to their deaths.

We continued to watch
the village from the edge of the treeline, waiting to see if anything moved or
stirred, but there was nothing. Not a single light or sound. The village
appeared deserted.

'You got anything?' I
asked Myers.

The trooper shook his
head. 'The scanner isn't picking up anything. I don't think anyone's home …'

‘Doesn't look like
it.'

I walked around to
Puppy’s fire team, spotting their helmets just above a thick cluster of ferns.

'Freaky as fuck,'
Puppy breathed as I crouched beside him.

I nodded grimly.
'Yeah, I'm gonna take a look.'

I hooked my arm
around to the right. 'I'll move in from that side with my whole fire team. If I
get contacted then I will need fire support from you to get back across the
open ground. I should be back in two hours, but if I'm not, then wait another
two before moving back to the platoon. This is pretty much our last chance to
gain intelligence, the Boss will need whatever he can get for Dakar.'

Puppy nodded, it was
a pretty standard brief. As the recce protection group, he provided me with the
cover I needed in case I was compromised, but there was always the danger that
I could be captured. If that happened, then I was probably as good as dead
anyway, and there was no sense in the other half of my section throwing
themselves away as well. It was harsh, but it was the risk you took.

'Any dramas?'

He shook his head. 'No.'

When I returned to my
fire team I closed them all in, quietly briefing them on the plan. We would
cross the farmland, using whatever cover we could find to reach the village
safely. I intended to head for the maglev airlock, assuming that it would
provide a weak point to allow us to force entry into the collapsed dome.

'Everyone happy with
what's going on?' I asked finally, and the two troopers nodded.

'I'd be happier if it
wasn't raining,' Myers said.

'Wouldn’t we all,' I
said gloomily. 'Follow me.'

We broke out of the
wood line, patrolling across the open ground, whilst trying our best to use
whatever cover was available to shield our approach. There was no point in
running, if anything that would merely make us even easier to spot.

The rain is actually
a godsend, I thought, as I followed along a shallow bund line. It rendered
thermal vision virtually useless, especially considering the minimal thermal
signature given off by our combats. The only way we could be spotted was by the
mark-one eyeball or visual sensors, or by an active scanning device, which
would be picked up by Myers’s own scanner long before it detected us.

There was a line of
small domes on the opposite side of the bund line, and I used them as extra
cover, peering through the plastic toward the ghostly village. There was a
slight whirring sound emanating from one of the domes - probably an air filter
similar to the one in my respirator. I leant closer to see what was inside.

Something squealed
from within the tiny dome, causing me to fall backwards in surprise. I
collapsed into the mud, legs flailing in the air.

‘Shit the bed!’ Myers
hissed ducking down behind the bund line. ‘What the hell was that?’

It was a pig, I
realised with a wave of relief, as the animal grunted in annoyance. It tramped
over to the far side of its dome, before making itself comfortable again.

I cursed the heavens
as I picked myself up from the mud, brushing wet earth away from my combats. We
waited in silence beside the small domes, half expecting someone to emerge from
the village to investigate, but no one came. I moved off again, this time avoiding
the domes.

The huge village dome
loomed over me as I cautiously approached the maglev airlock. It roared as a
million droplets of rain struck against its surface, pouring down to the ground
like a waterfall. Like ghostly apparitions, the buildings beyond the dome were
barely visible through the steamed plastic.

'Spooky,' Myers
observed.

He wasn’t wrong.

The maglev airlock
was the only part of the dome that hadn't collapsed - the plastic door held
rigid by a metal frame through which the train would enter. Beyond it was a
long ribbed tunnel, made of the same clear plastic as the dome. Originally the
train would have moved right into the tunnel, before the atmosphere was
exchanged so that passengers and freight could be offloaded. It wasn’t a
particularly elaborate airlock - it was simple and could be serviced easily.

I ran my hand over
the plastic airlock door. The material flexed easily, indicating that it wasn't
too thick. I drew my bayonet and punctured the plastic. There was no alarm, no
movement, and no shouting as I withdrew the blade.

After a pause of
several seconds, I returned my bayonet to the hole and sliced the plastic sheet
open, creating a hole large enough for me to enter. Mist poured out from the
gap, rapidly dispersing into the air, but still there was no sound from inside.

I turned back to look
across the open ground. My visor could only just identify Puppy's fire team in
the pouring rain, their weapons scanning for targets to engage. If somebody was
approaching then he would be forced to break net silence to alert me, and so
his silence gave me some reassurance, that and the fact that Myers’s scanner
remained silent.

Pulling the plastic
to one side, I stepped into the tunnel beyond, sweeping my rifle in search of
targets. Myers followed just behind, snapping his rifle up as soon as he
negotiated the hole, but there was nothing for us to shoot at.

Dark and shrouded in
mist, the village was like a graveyard. The atmospheric dome hung right down in
between the buildings, weighted by building pools of water that threatened to
rip through it. The streets were deserted, the lights were out, and the windows
were black. It was like a ghost town.

'I don't like this ...'
Myers sounded nervous.

I spared him a quick
glance as I stabbed my bayonet into the plastic wall of the tunnel. I didn’t
like it either, but said, 'I don't think there's anyone around.'

'Not alive, anyway ...'
Skelton added.

I smiled darkly. 'The
dead can’t hurt you. It's the living you need to worry about.'

I ripped my bayonet
through the plastic and stepped into the village.

The three of us fanned
out into a narrow street flanked by two-storey houses, our weapons trained onto
the blackened windows and the dark alleyways that ran between them. The roof
had sagged between the buildings so that it left only just enough room for us
to move down the street without having to crouch.

I waved my hand
downward and we each took a knee, waiting again to see if somebody noticed our
entry to the village. For several minutes we waited, watching, listening and
scanning for any sign of life. It was strangely cold inside the dome, almost
colder than it was outside.

Myers was right, the
village was seriously spooky. Despite the roar of the rain pounding on the roof
above us, it had an eerie silence - no - a
stillness
about it that was
altogether haunting. Something terrible had happened in that village -
something so awful that it had somehow sunk into everything around it. I
remembered the murdered civilians by the train, and shivered.

‘Anything on the
scanner?’ I asked in a whisper.

Myers shook his head
slowly, not taking his eyes away from the windows. ‘No.’

‘OK. We don’t have
time to check everywhere, so we’ll do a quick lap of the village. Identify
anything that stands out to you, then once we’ve done the lap we’ll have a
quick chat and have a more detailed look at areas of interest. Happy?’

The two troopers
nodded.

We set off around the
village, negotiating the collapsed roof as we searched for anything of
interest. We crept through alleyways and along tunnels formed where the plastic
had dipped right down to the ground, swollen by rivers of rainwater that ran
along its length. I began to notice that water was pouring through holes
punched in the plastic, forming growing puddles on the ground at our feet. Some
of the holes were far larger, as though somebody had attacked the roof with a
knife.

Something had
detonated above the village, most likely an artillery shell, with the intention
of collapsing the dome and showering the inhabitants in shrapnel. It would have
caused mass panic as the filtered air rapidly escaped into the atmosphere,
sending people running for shelter in their homes, sealing their doors and
donning their respirators. There were signs of shrapnel damage to the buildings,
confirming my theory, and all of the doors had been left open.

After completing our
loop we arrived back at the maglev airlock, closing back together to discuss
what we had seen and any areas we wanted to investigate further.

‘The village was hit
by artillery,’ I whispered as we huddled together, ‘and by the looks of it
everyone ran.’

‘The Loyalists must
have done it when they attacked the village,’ Skelton decided.

I nodded slowly. ‘Maybe,
but I don’t remember artillery. It looked to me like they were trying to
capture the village, not destroy it.’

‘Perhaps they
bombarded it when they heard the Guard were coming, then killed the civilians
in the train as they tried to escape.’

‘Makes sense.’ I
turned to Myers. ‘Still nothing?’

‘Not a blip.’

‘OK. I want to look
at the buildings in the centre of the village, maybe try and find out what
happened here.’

Myers looked nervously
back into the dark cluster of buildings. ‘I’m not sure I want to know what
happened here.’

The centre of the
village was almost pitch-black, and visibility was made worse by lack of
thermal imaging due to the ‘thermal crossover’ - a time in the day or at night
when everything achieved a similar temperature.

Skelton patted my
shoulder gently, stretching his arm to point at something on a building across
the street. I turned to look, trying to see what it was that made the building
stand out to him.

‘Wires,’ he breathed.

I squinted, finally
spotting a series of black cables that ran out of the nearest wall of the
structure, joining and crossing over each other until finally they formed a
great bundle at the roof. There they connected onto some kind of metal pole
that looked completely out of place in the village, as though it had been
bolted onto the building long after it was built. I recognised it instantly … it
was a military communication mast.

I crept up to the
side of the building, taking my place beside the door whilst the other two
troopers stacked up, Myers in front of me and Skelton behind, so that we were
almost touching each other facing the door. We would enter the room as one,
bringing all of our weapons to bear at once. With no idea what to expect inside
the building, I wasn’t taking any chances.

I leant slightly
outward from the wall, peering in through the doorway. The door had been left
slightly ajar, though I still couldn’t see much inside. I reached out and
squeezed Myers’s shoulder, indicating that we were ready.